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A comment on FAA Issues National Ground Stop.

Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by throwitaway222 on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:28PM (#50490016)
Anyone have a screen shot? I just see "NO Advisory"
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by lxgr on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:31PM (#50490083) 

    ATCSCC Advisory
    ATCSCC 111 DCC 11/13/2026 NATIONAL GROUND STOP 

    EVENT TIME: 13/2053 - 14/0400
    DUE TO EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES AND FOR REASONS OF SAFETY.
    ATTENTION ALL AIRCRAFT OPERATORS, BY ORDER OF THE FEDERAL AVIATION
    COMMAND CENTER ALL AIRPORTS ARE GROUND STOPPED. ALL DEPARTING
    TRAFFIC SHOULD REMAIN GROUND STOPPED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. INBOUND
    INTERNATIONAL FLIGHTS WILL BE MANAGED ON A CASE BY CASE BASIS.
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by tniemi on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:59PM (#50490521)
Holy french.
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by franze on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:13PM (#50490736)
Why

13/2053

?

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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by Maxion on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:14PM (#50490754)
UTC
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by dcrazy on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:16PM (#50490780)
My guess at parsing: in effect from 8:53pm UTC on the 13th to 4am UTC on the 14th.
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by 0cf8612b2e1e on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:23PM (#50490880)
Airplane software is some of the oldest on the planet, pre-dating anything that would be considered a best practice. When you see something weird in the space, assume it is because someone in the 1960s thought using more than two characters world be a profligate waste of space.

Unrolling these decisions is a monumental task given the decades of hardware already deployed in the field that will only be upgraded when the current unit fails.

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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by lxgr on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:34PM (#50491038)
> When you see something weird in the space, assume it is because someone in the 1960s thought using more than two characters world be a profligate waste of space.

And with 1960s technology, this might just have been a very reasonable decision.

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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by 0cf8612b2e1e on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:38PM (#50491088)
Totally. Just some of those decisions put awkward constraints when the hardware is now a million times more capable.
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by agildehaus on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:28PM (#50490947)
It's a format called "Date-Time Group" (DTG). Used in military, I think it dates back to teletypes, and is better to say over radio than modern ISO formats.
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by goldfingeroo7 on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:30PM (#50490979)
Friday the 13th at 08:53 PM UTC
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by brendoelfrendo on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:32PM (#50490099)
It disappeared briefly, but is back now.
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by lxgr on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:36PM (#50490143)
Same here, I get it only on some refreshes, otherwise it shows "no advisories". I hope that's not the main path these things are disseminated normally.
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by adamsb6 on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:50PM (#50490380)
This thing is probably getting 10,000+% normal traffic, database is timing out on some queries, and it represents no answer as no notice.
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by lxgr on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:57PM (#50490492)
That would be a pretty concerning way of handling database failures, but I suspect you might be right.
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by mikeyouse on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:33PM (#50490103)
From Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/s/HUT3wjABQ6

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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by kulahan on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:36PM (#50490153)
For anyone who doesn’t want to click through, there are problems with “frequencies”. Something must be jamming up the airways… but nationwide??
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by inamberclad on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:38PM (#50490183)
Probably a telecom issue. Most radio transmitters are operated over phone or Internet from a remote station.
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by chinathrow on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:06PM (#50490619)
Teams phone down?
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by sippingabonedry on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:28PM (#50490951)
Are these systems dependent on landlines?

VZW and AT&T are moving full tilt in shutting down landline central offices.

Literally the gay dude from Airplane pulling the plug from the socket may have happened here.

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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by _s on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:48PM (#50491223)
Na most are VoIP nowadays.
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by d1sxeyes on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:35PM (#50491040)
Looks fake. Outtages (sic)?
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by bbor on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:50PM (#50490381)
Oh nice, very helpful. The sibling thread mentions that this problem is specific to "ARTCCs", which are not the towers at airports but rather central hubs:

  Between the sectors administered by [smaller towers] are 20 contiguous areas of US airspace above 18,000 feet, each managed by an Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC)...
  A flight is handed off from one Center to another until it descends near its destination, when control is transferred to the TRACON serving the destination, and ultimately to the tower controller serving the airport.
Wikipedia mentions they in particular use special "very high frequency aviation bands" (around "AM 118-137 MHz"), which is presumably why they're all linked together. It also mentions sharing systems, but no clear specifics that I can find. Certainly doesn't disprove the botched rollout theory, tho...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_control_center

EDIT: someone below posted this, seems relevant -- the 'Radar multiplexer pipeline' that's on a "fast track" and an "aggressive track": https://www.sunhillo.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/SUN3125-... TL;DR: upgrading radio systems from old analog tech to new digital tech, I think?

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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by londons_explore on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:04PM (#50490597)
[delayed]
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by lxgr on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:24PM (#50490894)
That’s obviously not what’s happening. But if this upgrade is really implicated, the real question would be where the line of accepted residual risk for an outage like this was drawn.
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by CobrastanJorji on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:43PM (#50491166)
Well sure, but I wouldn't be shocked at all if someone greenlit a plan that wasn't supposed to involve closing the airspace, but which failed and which had an insufficiently thought out rollback plan.
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by ryanschaefer on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:39PM (#50490209)
Seems “not great” that the notice isn’t even showing…
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by java-man on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:53PM (#50490434)
https://nasstatus.faa.gov/map
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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by cobychapple on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:58PM (#50490495)
https://i.postimg.cc/XqcsDQw9/image.png
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