A UPS cargo plane collided with a Copa Airlines passenger jet at Miami International Airport, one day after a nationwide aviation ground stop caused thousands of flight delays and cancellations across the US. The two aircraft made contact at the intersection of two taxiways at about 9:15 PM, as reported by the New York Post.
The Copa jet was arriving from Panama City, while the UPS aircraft was headed for Bogota, Colombia. Shortly after the collision, the Copa pilot got on the radio and reported that “somebody hit us,” and air traffic control then contacted the crew of UPS Flight 358.
“UPS 358, did you hit that aircraft?” the controller asked, according to air traffic control audio. The pilot answered, “Yeah, we went too far, and he clipped us with his wing.”
At least nobody was badly hurt
Greg Chin, the communications director for Miami International Airport, said, “Flights are being directed to other taxiways, so there is no impact to airport operations at this time.” He added, “Two patients were treated on the scene by Miami-Dade Fire Rescue for minor injuries and did not require medical transport.”
The ground stop came when the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) suspended departing flights across the country due to a communications failure. It hit during a stretch of travel headaches that also included a Frontier aisle seat dispute on a full flight. There is no confirmed connection between the collision and the previous day’s air traffic control problems.
During the nationwide FAA outage, more than 13,000 flights were delayed or canceled. The ground stop was lifted roughly four hours after it started, letting departures resume. Sean Duffy, the US transportation secretary, said, “So at 8:15 tonight, Eastern Time, we’ve opened up the airspace. But it’s going to take us some time to unwind what happened this afternoon.”
At a White House briefing, Duffy blamed the outage on overloaded network equipment within the FAA’s aging infrastructure, per CNN. “Our (network) switches, our routers, actually got overloaded with data,” he said. “They started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers. And because of that, we shut the system down.”
Duffy also pointed to the outdated technology that still supports the country’s air traffic control network. “We use 1980s little copper lines. It’s an old system that went down. And it went down everywhere; it got overloaded,” he said.
US Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, who was also at the briefing with President Donald Trump, suggested the failure was linked to the FAA’s recent efforts to upgrade older systems with newer technology. Mullin said the FAA was “putting in new equipment, new technology. And that new equipment, new technology, just, it was overwhelming the older system, which is why Secretary Duffy made it very clear the patchwork doesn’t work. We need one complete system.”
Although the FAA lifted the nationwide ground stop, Duffy warned that airlines could keep seeing delays and cancellations for several days.
Published: Nov 15, 2026 11:15 am