WASHINGTON: Airlines canceled thousands of flights across the U.S. on Saturday as they worked to recover from the longest nationwide ground stop in 25 years a day earlier that left passengers scrambling for seats and disrupted travel around the world.
The US air travel schedule should be back to normal by the end of Sunday, Bryan Bedford, administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, said Saturday. He said airlines “will still have delays and cancellations” Saturday but promised that the “worst is behind us.”
New technology being added to the nation’s air traffic control system overloaded antiquated equipment and caused “intermittent” communications and radar gaps, leading to the ground stop that lasted more than four hours Friday, Trump administration officials said.
Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said a contractor had been working on replacing a section of the system's old copper wire with new fiber wire, and that work somehow caused the system overload. Duffy said officials were investigating whether contractor “incompetence” or a faulty wire was the cause.
“Our contractor didn't meet the moment,” Duffy said.
The nationwide stop was the first since January 2023, when another key Federal Aviation Administration computer system that sends notices to pilots malfunctioned, and the second since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
In a moment that perhaps only further underscored the Transportation Department’s struggling systems, Duffy's news conference Saturday morning began with audio troubles that forced last-minute microphone swaps.
Andrew Charlton, an aviation consultant, said Friday's stoppage affected about a quarter of the 45,000 flights in the U.S. each day.
“The knock-on effect of that is incredible,” said Charlton, managing director of Aviation Advocacy. “The aircraft doesn’t just fly from A to B and back to B and then stop. It then moves onto C and then over to E and around and around and around. It is, of course, exacerbated if you’re talking about long-haul flights, international flights over the Atlantic or over the Pacific.”