Note, 14 November 2026

Every US airport was told: no takeoffs. What the sky did.

At 3:54 pm Eastern on Friday 13 November 2026 the FAA Command Center ordered a nationwide ground stop. It signed the cancellation at 8:19 pm. We drew the sky over the contiguous US from public flight data, minute by minute from the order to 6:50 pm, and put the Friday before beside it.

What happened

All times are US Eastern, on Friday 13 November 2026.

The Transportation Secretary said the systems began to falter at 3:36 pm (NYT).

At 3:54 pm the FAA Command Center signed Advisory 111: "ALL AIRPORTS ARE GROUND STOPPED. ALL DEPARTING TRAFFIC SHOULD REMAIN GROUND STOPPED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE." (FAA Advisory 111)

Hundreds of flights already in the air were diverted. AP, citing the analytics company Cirium, counted at least 600 diverted flights as of 5:50 pm: 496 back to the airport they had left, 104 to another one (AP).

At 8:19 pm Advisory 005, dated 14 November in UTC, said: "THE FAA COMMAND CENTER NATIONWIDE GROUND STOP HAS BEEN CANCELLED." (FAA Advisory 005) From 3:54 to 8:19 pm is 4 hours 25 minutes, by the two advisories' signing times.

The Transportation Secretary said at the evening briefing (CNN post, 8:49 pm): "Our routers actually got overloaded with data, and… they started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers. And because of that, we shut the system down." (CNN)

The FAA itself has not published a cause. Officials said they are still investigating.

The last nationwide ground stop was on 11 January 2023 and lasted about 90 minutes (NYT). Before that came 11 September 2001, when aircraft in the air were ordered to land (9/11 Commission Report, chapter 1).

What the picture is

Every dot is a real aircraft from the public adsb.lol archive, from 3:54 to 6:50 pm Eastern on 13 November, placed once a minute; between two reports its position is interpolated.

The count is the number of aircraft the archive tracked in the air over the contiguous US: 5,381 at 3:54 pm and 816 at 6:50 pm. On Friday 6 November, the same minutes had 6,879 and 5,305.

The two Fridays were already about 4 to 9 percent apart in the two and a half hours before the trouble. That is why the film says "the Friday before" and not "usual".

Coral dots are aircraft the data saw leave the ground after the order. About two thirds flew under their own registration, not an airline callsign, and most of those were small aircraft. The rest included long-haul international departures.

The blue dots at the end are the Friday before, 6 November, the same minutes, from the same archive. Day turns to night where the sun really set. Heights are drawn more than 20 times too tall, so you can see them.

What the film does not show or claim

The archive's day ends at 7 pm Eastern, so the picture stops at 6:50 pm. That is 89 minutes before the order was cancelled at 8:19 pm.

Our count is only what this archive tracked. The Transportation Secretary, for example, said more than 3,500 airplanes were in the air when the stop began. We do not know what his count includes, so we do not compare it with ours.

The slowdown in our data began before the order. Airline takeoffs had nearly stopped by about 3:40 pm, about 15 minutes before the nationwide order was signed at 3:54 pm, and the Transportation Secretary said the trouble began at 3:36 pm. The chart in the film starts at 3:24 pm, half an hour before the order, so the early drop can be seen.

Of the 5,381 aircraft in the air at the order, the archive's tracks for 5,035 ended below 12,000 feet by 6:50 pm, and 113 were still up.

We do not know the cause. The Transportation Secretary blamed overloaded routers; the Homeland Security Secretary said new equipment patched into the old system had overwhelmed it (CNN). The FAA has not published an account of its own.

Two lines of the narration are shorter than the facts. "Nothing was wrong with the planes" is our inference: no source reports an aircraft fault, and officials described a problem in air traffic control systems. "Came in to land" is true of most of the aircraft in the air at the order, not of every one, as the numbers above show.

Our reading

This is our reading, not a finding. By the Transportation Secretary's account, the system was shut down because its data had become inconsistent. In the flight data, what follows looks controlled: airline departures fall to a trickle within minutes, and most of the aircraft already up come down over the next three hours. We build hardware and software, and that is the order we would want from any system that stops trusting its inputs: close the intake first, then land what is already inside.

About the film

Drawn from data, not footage. The voice is synthetic (Kokoro, local text to speech). Music: "Sci-Fi Score" by Arulo (Mixkit).

Transcript

Every U.S. airport was told: no takeoffs.

Nothing was wrong with the planes.

These dots are real flights. The ones already in the air came in to land. Hundreds were diverted.

The last time was 2023. Before that, 9/11, when planes in the air were ordered to land.

On Friday, the order stood for more than four hours.

The Transportation Secretary blamed routers, overloaded with data.

By 6:50 p.m., the data showed about 800 in the air. The Friday before: 5,300.

All notes