Nationwide ground stop: How quickly can planes get back on the ground?

Antoine, I'll pause right there while I'll let you get back to work, but don't go anywhere because we're going to, we're joined right now with Nick Gregory, of course, our chief meteorologist, also a pilot who trains other pilots himself. Nick is calling in on the phone. Nick, thank you so much for joining us today. Yeah. You've heard what's going on. My question for you, just to advance it a little, how quickly can we get all the planes that are in the air on a given day, especially a busy Friday, back on the ground? Well, that's a very good question because, you know, the way, what I understand the outage has to do with the air route traffic control centers with frequency outages. And just so you get an idea of how that works, when aircraft travel from point A to point B, so they leave, they speak to the tower frequency, they then get handed off to the next controller, which is the departure frequency. They then get handed off to the air route traffic control centers that handle them en route. And then on their arrival, they get handed off to the approach control frequency. And then once again, they get handed to the tower just before landing. So what I've been able to try to find out here is that it's the middle leg, the air route traffic control centers that are having the communication problem. So what the ground stop, from what I understand, means is they don't want any other airplanes in the air because they can't communicate with them in certain... I don't know if it's affecting the entire country, or it's just several sectors that's not been specific, but that is the, from what I've been able to discover, is that's where the problem lies with the air route traffic control centers, again, the en route portion of the flight from point A to point B. And it sounds like, Nick, from what you're saying, even if it is a regional issue, they, out of an abundance of caution, they've got to ground the whole country because they can't risk air traffic controllers not being able to talk to one another and talk to the pilots and land the plane safely or have them take off. Well, that's correct, because what happens is as these planes travel, they go from sector to sector to sector to sector. I think one sector handles a particular geographic region, and then when the aircraft is leaving that sector, They get handed off to the next sector. Well, if that sector is the one having the problem, they can't communicate with that sector. Well, you're not going to, that's definitely a recipe for, you know, a bigger problem. So in the essence of safety, just don't have any airplanes get in the air. And the last time this happened was, I believe, 2023. Yes. When it was the notices to airmen system that crashed. And that provides, you know, information to pilots. About airports, about runway closures, about air traffic control issues, those types of things. And so when that system went down, the FAA did the same thing. So it's kind of, I suspect that they're doing the same proactive measure here. While they can't communicate with certain sectors, the best practice would be just to not have airplanes in the air until they figure out what the problem is. And just back to as these planes are brought down on the ground, one can assume, I guess, I don't know how quickly all that happens. But am I correct, Nick, that that planes have to land exactly the closest airport they can get to when something like this is issued? Does that sound right? It can be, again, depending on how how much the FAA is enforcing an immediate landing or, you know, 9-11 was an immediate landing. That was a whole different scenario because we were under attack. You know, during that event, you know, it may not be quite as critical this time because it's not that the suspicions were not under attack by anything, but it was just a loss of communication. So in best practice, they would likely steer them to the nearest airport until they can solve the problem. Yeah. All right. Next.