美国上空持续四个半小时没有飞机飞行。通常情况下，无论白天还是夜晚，都有数千架次飞机起飞、穿越全国、降落。据航空追踪网站 Flightradar24 显示，当联邦航空管理局因“特殊情况及安全原因”于今天下午 4 点左右下令停飞所有美国航班时，约有 4000 架飞机正在空中飞往美国机场。即使没有更多航班起飞，所有这些飞机也都需要降落。
For four and a half hours, the sky above the United States emptied out.
对于地面上的人们来说，让这些飞机安全降落成为当务之急。在近代历史上，这种全国性的停飞仅发生过两次——一次是“9·11”袭击事件后，另一次是 2023 年 1 月，持续约一个半小时。尽管通信似乎时断时续，每一架仍在空中的飞机都必须抵达目的地。
Normally, throughout the day and the night, thousands of planes are taking off, crisscrossing the country, and landing. When the Federal Aviation Administration grounded all U.S. flights around 4:00 p.m. today, because of “extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety,” some 4,000 airplanes were in the sky, headed for U.S. airports, according to Flightradar24, an aviation-tracking website. Even if no more flights took off, all of those planes needed to land.
我们强大的飞行系统是一台持续运转、精确到分钟的机器，内置了备用机制。麻省理工学院国际航空运输中心主任 R. John Hansman 告诉我，如果失去无线电通信，飞行员有可依赖的应急系统，机载系统也能探测周围其他飞机的位置。他说，通信问题通常不意味着直接的安全风险，飞机仍可继续飞向目的地。“问题在于如何让它们安全落地。”
For the people below, getting them down safely became an immediate preoccupation. This type of nationwide grounding had happened only twice before in recent history—once after the September 11 attacks, and once in January 2023 for about an hour and a half. Every aircraft still aloft needed to make it to its destination, despite apparently spotty communications.
他说：“风险取决于你可能撞上多少其他飞机。所以如果你停止让新飞机进入系统，情况就会变得越来越安全、越来越安全、越来越安全，直到空中没有飞机。但当然，那样就没人能飞了，对吧？”
Our formidable system of flight, a machine that’s constantly in motion and choreographed to the minute, has backups built in. Pilots have emergency systems they can rely on if they lose radio communications, as well as onboard systems to detect where other aircraft are around them, R. John Hansman, the director of the MIT International Center for Air Transportation, told me. Communications problems don’t generally mean an immediate safety risk, and planes can still fly toward their destinations, he said. “The problem is getting them safely down.”
宣布停飞的那一刻，本该有飞机降落。随后几分钟、几小时里，飞机相继着陆。Flightradar24 发言人 Ian Petchenik 告诉我，三小时内，空中剩余航班数量降至 550 架。轮子着地；机上乘客和跟踪航班的人都松了一口气；飞行员从驾驶舱传来安抚。一架降落在奥斯汀的航班上，载着一群前往书展的作家（包括我的一些同事），飞行员在滑行道上向乘客解释延误原因，说是“联邦航空局出了点小问题，各位，所以没人起飞，也没有空闲登机口。”
事发最初几小时，特朗普政府几未给出即时安抚，也未说明出了什么问题，或修复可能需要多久。
“The risk is related to how many other airplanes you could bump into,” he said. “So if you stop putting new airplanes into the system, then it becomes safer and safer and safer, until there’s no airplanes in the air. But of course, nobody’s flying, right?”
国土安全部部长马克韦恩·马林表示：“截至目前，这只是一起电信中断事件。”中断开始四个多小时后，马林在白宫告诉记者，“我们没有看到任何证据表明这是一起网络攻击”，但也没有排除这种可能，或解释中断的原因。交通部部长肖恩·达菲当时正乘坐从达拉斯起飞的飞机，因停飞令而滞留，他在新闻发布会上表示，美国空管人员在通信和雷达方面面临“不稳定”状况——交换机和路由器“实际上因数据过载而不堪重负”。
At the moment that the ground stop was declared, planes would have been landing. They landed in the minutes afterward, and in the hours after that. Within three hours, the number of flights still in the air had dropped to 550, Ian Petchenik, a spokesperson for Flightradar24, told me. Wheels hit the ground; the people on the plane and the people tracking their flights exhaled; pilots offered reassurances from the cockpit. On a plane that landed in Austin, carrying a number of writers headed a book festival (including some of my colleagues), the pilot explained the delay on the tarmac by telling passengers there had been a “little issue with the FAA, folks, so no one is taking off and so there are no gates free.”In the first hours, the Trump administration offered little immediate reassurance, or clarification of what had gone wrong or how long it might take to fix. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said, “It’s just a telecommunication outage as of right now.”More than four hours after the outage began, Mullin told reporters at the White House that “we have seen zero evidence that this was a cyberattack” but also did not rule it out or explain a cause for the outage.
他将责任归咎于老旧的模拟设备和软件，并要求国会拨款500亿美元修复系统。“故障将持续发生，”他说。
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who was on an airplane from Dallas amid the ground stop, said at the press conference that the country’s air traffic controllers faced “instability” in communications and radar—that switches and routers “actually got overwhelmed with data.”He blamed old analog equipment and software, and demanded $50 billion from Congress to fix the system. “It’s going to continue to fail,” he said.
达菲表示，部分问题影响了与空中航路交通管制中心的通信，该网络由22个区域枢纽组成。飞机在飞越全国时与这些中心通信。中断还影响了所谓的终端雷达进近管制设施，空管人员在这些设施帮助引导进出机场的飞机。全国空管协会主席尼克·丹尼尔斯告诉CNN，在此次故障期间，空管人员显然可以在某些无线电频率上通信，但无法在其他频率上通信，他们不得不主动寻找与空中飞机通话的方法。
Some of the problems, Duffy said, affected communications with the Air Route Traffic Control Centers, a network of 22 regional hubs. Airplanes communicate with these centers as they fly across the country. The disruption also affected what are known as Terminal Radar Approach Controls, facilities where air traffic controllers help guide planes approaching and departing airports. During this outage, air traffic controllers could apparently communicate on some radio frequencies but not others, and they had to actively search for ways to talk with the airplanes in the sky, Nick Daniels, the president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, told CNN.
“这不仅仅是糟糕的一天，”他说。空管人员“在处理前所未见的情况”。随着时间拖长，飞机持续降落却不再起飞，机场变得拥挤。全国数千个航班被取消。乘客等待数小时，试图制定新计划，争相租车。他们回家，或返回酒店。社交媒体上的好心人提供搭车。在华盛顿特区外的罗纳德·里根国家机场，数百名滞留旅客围在一个极少转动的行李转盘旁，人们甚至觉得直接坐在转盘上都很舒服。
“This is not just a bad day,” he said. The air traffic controllers were “handling something that’s never been seen before.”As the hours dragged on and planes kept landing but not taking off, the airports got crowded. Thousands of flights across the country got canceled. Passengers waited for hours, trying to figure out new plans, and scrambled for rental cars. They went home, or back to their hotels. Good Samaritans on social media offered rides. At Ronald Reagan National Airport, just outside Washington, D.C., hundreds of grounded travelers waited around a baggage carousel that moved so rarely that people felt comfortable sitting directly on it.
身穿黑色手术服、戴着金耳环的超声专家达娜·约翰内森曾登上飞机又下机，随后等待行李数小时；她在飞机上坐着时，美国航空App仍将延误归因于天气，但机长通过广播说，一位朋友建议他放弃飞往坦帕，改租车，她说道。随后，停飞令于晚上8点15分解除。四小时前仍有数千架飞机在空中飞行，此时已全部降落。但空中剩余的飞机不足400架。这些飞机上的乘客按计划登机和下机。系统重新启动，飞机可以起飞了。
Dana Johannesson, an ultrasound specialist in black scrubs and gold hoops, had gotten on her plane then gotten off, before waiting for her bags for hours; while she had sat on the plane, the American Airlines app still attributed the delay to the weather, but the pilot got on the loudspeaker to say that a friend had told him to give up on flying into Tampa and book himself a rental, she said. Then the ground stop lifted at 8:15 p.m. Thousands of planes that had been flying four hours earlier had landed. But fewer than 400 were still in the air. The passengers on those planes got on and off their plane as planned. The system started up again, and the planes could take off.