On August 18, 2026, a system outage at the Federal Aviation Administration’s Minneapolis air traffic control facility temporarily halted radar and air traffic control operations across a 330,000 square mile area in the U.S. Midwest.
Flight Groundings and Delays Across Midwest
The outage forced planes heading into and departing Minnesota as well as nine other Midwest states to be grounded or diverted. The affected states include Michigan, Kansas, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.
Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport experienced average flight delays of 90 minutes on the evening of August 18, 2026. Despite the radar and traffic control systems coming back online later
in the day, flight disruptions and delays persisted across multiple airports in the region.
