Flights were halted at and airspace closed around Wilmington, Myrtle Beach and Charleston airports on the US east coast during a February 4 military operation to down a Chinese balloon that had transited US airspace.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said it "paused departures from and arrivals to" the airports "to support the Department of Defense in a national security effort".
The flight outage lasted around 90 minutes, going by the timings of the FAA announcements.
The US military sent a fighter jet to shoot down the balloon over US waters in the Atlantic Ocean after President Biden pledged to "take care" of the object, which had been tracked crossing US airspace. China claimed the object was a weather balloon that had been blown off course.
The government earlier said the device posed no danger to commercial air traffic.