Flight Chaos Leads a Packed Monday Night Broadcast
NBC Nightly News with Tom Llamas opened its September 21 broadcast with the mess unfolding across the Northeast skies: flights halted, passengers stranded and some of the country’s busiest airports thrown into hours of delays after a communications failure hit the air traffic control system.
Flights were beginning to resume by Monday evening, but not before the problems rippled from Philadelphia and Newark to JFK, LaGuardia and Boston. NBC reported more than 6,000 flight delays and over 1,000 cancellations during the broadcast, with United canceling most of its Newark schedule for the day.
The trouble started when a primary communications circuit failed at the FAA’s Philadelphia Terminal Radar facility. The backup was supposed to pick up the slack — except a fiber-optic line in New Jersey had also been accidentally cut during construction. Two failures, one very bad Monday for anybody holding a boarding pass.
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NBC Nightly News — September 21
Tom Llamas leads the Monday broadcast with the Northeast air traffic shutdown, followed by the day’s major national, political, business and human-interest stories.
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A Double Failure Brought Northeast Air Travel to a Crawl
NBC’s Tom Costello reported from Reagan National Airport as controllers and repair crews worked to restore the affected links. Ground stops hit Philadelphia, Newark, Teterboro, LaGuardia, JFK and Boston, with some delays stretching six hours or longer and disruptions spreading well beyond the East Coast.
By evening, the damaged line had been repaired and airport operations were beginning to move again. But with thousands of delayed travelers already scattered through terminals — and world leaders arriving in New York for the U.N. General Assembly — the outage had already turned into one of the day’s biggest stories.
The Rest of the Sept. 21 Broadcast
The episode moved quickly from the airport shutdown into the rest of Monday’s headlines. NBC covered a lawsuit filed by CNN, MS NOW and Politico after the outlets were barred from the White House, along with President Donald Trump’s U.N. meetings in New York and the possibility of talks with Iran’s president.
Also in the broadcast: an ICE officer shooting a DoorDash driver in Austin, the death of model Presley Gerber while at a rehab facility, the settlement clearing the Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger, and lawsuits alleging a connection between GLP-1 drugs and the rare eye condition NAION. NBC presented the GLP-1 claims as allegations being litigated, not a blanket finding that the medications cause blindness.
The back half of the show widened out from the hard news: a guilty verdict in the Vermont shooting of three Palestinian students, three tourists rescued after becoming trapped by the tide on an Oregon beach, a car crashing into a Massachusetts country club pro shop, and a closing “good news” story that flipped the usual autograph line around — Cincinnati Reds players asking young hospital patients for their signatures.
The September 21 episode runs about 20 minutes on Peacock, with the air traffic outage setting the pace before the broadcast moves through politics, public safety, business, health and its nightly closer.
NBC Nightly News With Tom Llamas — September 21, 2026 Broadcast
The September 21 broadcast leads with the Northeast air traffic disruption before moving through the rest of Monday’s major headlines.
Source: NBC News / NBC Nightly News with Tom Llamas / Peacock.
