WASHINGTON — Airlines canceled thousands of flights across the U.S. on Saturday as they worked to recover from a nationwide ground stop a day earlier that left passengers scrambling for seats and disrupted travel around the world.
The U.S. air travel schedule should be back to normal by the end of Sunday, two days after what was the nation's longest ground stop in 25 years, Bryan Bedford, administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, said. 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 Friday's ground stop that lasted more than four hours, Trump administration officials said.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told reporters Saturday that a contractor had been 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 router was the cause.
“Our contractor didn't meet the moment,” Duffy said, blaming L3Harris Technologies Inc.
The nationwide stop was the first since January 2023, when a key FAA computer system that sends notices to pilots malfunctioned, and the second since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
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.”
Thousands of flights delayed and canceled
At airports across the U.S. on Saturday, passengers were still scrambling to figure out how to get to their destinations.
Dan Russell, 66, learned his connecting flight from Kona, Hawaii, to Fresno, California, was canceled a half-hour before boarding was scheduled in San Diego on Friday night. San Diego hotels were full, so he and his wife waited at the airport for a rebooked flight on Saturday.
“There’s nothing you can do,” he said, as his wife, Mary, tried to nap on his shoulder.
A cheerful Southwest Airlines gate agent at Dallas Love Field greeted passengers at dawn with, “Good morning, good morning,” then repeatedly said all flights were full and asked passengers to have boarding passes ready to help keep flights moving.
In Las Vegas, Korean Mexican influencer Sujin Kim, known online as Chingu Amiga, said her Friday flight to Mexico was rescheduled for Saturday morning. Kim said she had never experienced anything like it, though she travels often and “I always lose my suitcase.”
“Many people ended up sleeping at the airport, too, but thank God we managed to find a room,” she said.
At the Newark, N.J., airport, Umi Egchi was trying to figure out when his flights would line up so he could return home to Japan.
“I’m not sure exactly what happened. I just want to go home,” said Egchi, who had a sleep mask on top of his head.
Sports teams scheduled to play this weekend adjusted game start times after rescheduling flights and chartering buses. No. 19 Mississippi's game at Oklahoma was delayed a full day to Sunday.
FlightAware, a website that tracks flights, said more than 4,100 flights had been canceled Saturday. Cirium, a similar site, put that number above 3,200 flights.
Officials say no one was in danger during ground stop
Duffy reiterated Saturday 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.
Trump administration officials also continued to blame Congress for failing to approve more funding to replace the decades-old technology that helps manage the U.S. air traffic. Duffy said that 70% of the system had been replaced with fiber optic wire but that his agency also needs new air traffic control towers and runways.
The FAA has replaced thousands of old copper wires with fiber optic lines and upgraded hundreds of radio systems as part of an overhaul that began last year after Congress approved $12.5 billion in funding. Duffy and the White House are pushing for $30 billion more to complete the work.
“We have aging infrastructure throughout the airspace,” Duffy said, while stressing that flying remains safe. “You won’t get to your destination if we don’t think you can get there safely.”
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.
Although Duffy said he had repeatedly spoken with President Donald Trump since the ground stop began, the president has largely been quiet on the topic. He has not spoken publicly on the matter, nor issued statements via social media, although he commented on other things. He spoke on the phone with a Fox News reporter, but that was not on camera.
Charlton, the aviation consultant, said the problem was due to updating a system that can never shut down.
“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,” 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.”
Past problems have been linked to equipment failures
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 fiber optic line. Aging 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.
“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,” said Arroyo, a former United Airlines pilot.
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, Arroyo said.
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This version has been updated to correct that Duffy said investigators were looking at whether a possible faulty router, not a faulty wire, might have been the cause
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Kruesi reported from Providence, Rhode Island. Associated Press journalists Josh Funk in Omaha, Nebraska, Elliot Spagat in San Diego, Bernice Bautista in Las Vegas, and Hannah Fingerhut in Des Moines, Iowa, also contributed.
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