Manchester-Boston Regional and Logan airports are both telling people to check with their airline about flights before coming to the airport because of a very unusual nationwide “ground stop” order from the Federal Aviation Administration.
“We appreciate your patience and will share updates as more information becomes available,” Manchester airport wrote in a statement posted online Friday afternoon.
The FAA announced the ground stop Friday afternoon shortly after 4 p.m., in what appeared to be a major outage affecting its air traffic control system. Under the order, all departing aircraft were ordered to remain on the ground, while landings by incoming flights were managed on a case-by-case basis.
According to the flight tracking app Flighty, there were more than 30,000 departures and arrivals scheduled for the remainder of the day after the stop order was issued.
The last time there was a nationwide groundstop was in January 2023, according to the Associated Press.
