How local airports are affected by nationwide outage

Airports are experiencing thousands of flight disruptions after the Federal Aviation Administration suffered a Wednesday outage of the system that provides safety info to flight crews, briefly halting all domestic flight departures nationwide. 

This was the first time the FAA grounded all domestic flights since 9/11. The cause of the outage is unknown. 

Normal air traffic operations are resuming gradually with the lift of the ground stop. Despite the cascade of delays from the FAA’s action, the St. Pete-Clearwater International Airport has dodged the massive ripple effect.  

“PIE was fortunate to not experience any delays due to the FAA ground stop this morning. This was simply due to good timing based on our flight schedule,” an airport spokesperson said. 

Allegiant Airlines is the primary airline serving the airport in addition to Swoop Airlines and Sun Country Airlines. 

As for the Tampa International Airport, a spokesperson said, “the disruption caused a little more than half of our flights to be delayed so far and about 3% of our flights are canceled. We did have flights operating in the early morning hours but experienced the same ground stop other airports did between about 7:15 a.m. to 9 a.m., causing a bit of a backup.”

TPA is advising travelers to continue checking directly with their airline for the latest regarding flight updates.

The major airlines at TPA include Southwest Airlines, American Airlines, Jet Blue, Frontier Airlines and others. 

FlightAware, which tracks departing and arriving flights at airports, reported 8,116 delays and 1,198 cancellations within, into, or out of the United States as of Wednesday afternoon.