PA MediaAirlines cancelled thousands of flights across the US on Saturday as they worked to recover from the longest nationwide ground stop in 25 years, which 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 (FAA), said. He said airlines “will still have delays and cancellations” 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 on 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 fibre wire, and that work somehow caused the system overload.
Mr Duffy said officials were investigating whether contractor “incompetence” or a faulty wire was the cause.
“Our contractor didn’t meet the moment,” Mr Duffy said.
PA MediaThe 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 September 11 2001, attacks.
In a moment that perhaps only further underscored the Transportation Department’s struggling systems, Mr Duffy’s news conference on 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 US each day.
Mr Charlton, manager of Aviation Advocacy, said: “The knock-on effect of that is incredible. 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.”
At airports, passengers stared at screens showing delays or rushed to find buses or trains to their destinations.
Emily Brown and her 14-year-old daughter waited for more than four hours at the Dallas airport for a flight to Columbus, Ohio, before giving up.
PA MediaThey were travelling to surprise her daughter’s best friend. Instead, she had to settle for phoning the friend through tears in the airport, Ms Brown said.
“She saved up her money to buy her own ticket, and she’s planned this whole weekend,” Ms Brown said. “Now we’re not sure when we’re going to be able to go.”
A cheerful Southwest Airlines gate agent greeted passengers at Dallas Love Field at dawn Saturday with, “Good morning, good morning”, then repeatedly said all flights were full and asked passengers to have boarding passes ready to expedite the process and help keep flights moving.
Sports teams scheduled to play this weekend adjusted game start times, searched for hotel rooms, rescheduled flights and chartered buses.
FlightAware, a website that tracks flights, said more than 4,100 flights had been cancelled. While Cirium, a similar site, put that number above 3,200 flights.
At London’s Heathrow Airport, several flights to and from the US were listed as delayed or cancelled.
Tim Johnson, consumer director at the UK Civil Aviation Authority, said: “While US flights have resumed, there may be some follow-on disruption as airlines work to rebook affected passengers and get all services back to normal.”
Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin told reporters that no one was in any danger as more than 3,000 flights in the air at the time of the grounding order landed safely.
Mr Duffy blamed Congress for failing to approve more funding for new technology, while downplaying the fact that trying to implement new fixes overtaxed the system. He suggested more disruptions might occur.
“We didn’t think we would have this kind of outage. We did,” he said. “We were able to review what went wrong, and then reboot the system and go. But, you will have more of these.”
Mr Duffy said the failure involved old equipment and was not linked to the FAA’s new AI-powered system, which the agency is rolling out to help predict problems in the sky.
The problem was due to updating a system that can never shut down, Mr Charlton said.
“What you’re watching here is trying to change the tires of your car when the car’s going at 80 miles an hour down the expressway, because nothing stops in aviation,” Mr Charlton said. “It’s a 24/7 operation. And to make changes on the fly, if you’ll pardon that pun, is incredibly complex and dangerous.”
The FAA already replaced thousands of old copper wires with fibre optic lines and upgraded hundreds of radio systems as part of the overhaul that began last year after Congress approved 12.5 billion dollars in funding.
Mr Duffy and the White House are pushing for an additional 30 billion dollars to complete the work.
The problem appeared similar to a regional air traffic control communication outage in September that snarled hundreds of flights across the Northeast, although that disruption was linked to a construction crew cutting a fibre optic line.
Ageing equipment was also blamed for brief radar outages last year that disrupted Newark airport.
Aviation safety expert Steve Arroyo said the difference this time was the nationwide scale of the disruption, which left controllers unable to reliably talk to pilots.
Mr Arroyo, a former United Airlines pilot, said: “If you don’t have that ability, whether it’s because the old wires that they have are just run down or for whatever reason, you’ve got to stop airplanes on the ground and not put them in the air, where you’re going to risk not being able to communicate with them.”
It differed from the one after 9/11 because planes were not being told to land immediately and pilots likely were able to communicate with ground controllers at airports, Mr Arroyo said.
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