NEW DELHI: The grounding of all commercial flight traffic across the US on Friday for four hours has disrupted the schedules of over 8,000 flights across the world.
Multiple versions of the reason behind this largest airspace shutdown in the US since 9/11 are emerging. Air India, India’s only flight operator to the US managed the crisis smoothly since all its ten flights to and from the US were airborne, it claimed.
The official version is that a telecommunications outage affected the air traffic control systems across US airports. “Extraordinary circumstances and reasons for safety” was specified as the reason for the chaos by the Federal Aviation Administration in the US.
Speaking to TNIE, a reputed aviation expert (requesting anonymity) said, “The air is thick with rumours, with multiple versions emerging. There is talk that these glitches have been deliberately created. Microsoft Outlook was affected a day ago. The air traffic network has been affected today, and there is big talk of a hacking job by Iran. It is also rumoured that artificial intelligence being experimented with has resulted in a system collapse.”
A senior pilot said, “What we seem to understand is that there was an overload in the old analogue system. Such glitches do happen, and it is just a technical issue.”
An Air India official told TNIE, “Except for one flight from Delhi to San Francisco (AI 183), none of the flights had any problem.”