Thousands of US flights canceled, delayed as air travel system recovers from shutdown

WASHINGTON/NEWARK, New Jersey: Major airlines on Saturday canceled more than 3,700 US flights and delayed 2,000 more as the United States sought to recover from the longest nationwide shutdown of flights since the September 11, 2001, attacks. The FAA on Friday issued a nationwide ground stop that halted nearly all departing flights for almost five hours, which forced airlines to cancel nearly 10,000 flights and delay more than 7,000 others in one of the worst travel days in US history. Though the FAA eventually lifted the ground stop on Friday night, the disruption for passengers was far from over, with tens of thousands of people still stranded at airports around the country. Airlines were trying to unclog airports and get flight crews and other personnel in position to recover from the massive disruption. United Airlines and Delta Air Lines on Saturday announced ground stops for their own flights at Chicago O'Hare Airport and at New York LaGuardia Airport, respectively, to handle congestion and gate issues. Many major airports said they could not handle any more diversions as they tried to get airplanes back in the sky. American Airlines late on Friday said it was prioritizing flights to international destinations and to smaller cities outside its major hubs to position aircraft and crews for a faster recovery. The FAA issued the ground stop because of an outage that appeared to be affecting a network that handles critical radio frequencies used by air traffic controllers to communicate with pilots, according to two airline officials. The contractor that oversees the network, L3Harris, did not respond to a request for comment. FUNDS SOUGHT TO FIX 'EMERGENCY' Friday's problem is the latest and most dramatic sign of strain on a US air traffic control system beset by aging technology, equipment and communications problems and a shortage of several thousand controllers. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on Friday called for $50 billion in funding to upgrade air traffic control systems, up from $30 billion he had sought earlier. "This is an emergency," he said. Duffy said the trouble began at 3:36 p.m. ET (2036 GMT), when air traffic control centers experienced instability in radar and communications systems. "Our switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data and they started to give us inconsistencies in the data from those routers and because of that we shut the system down," Duffy said, adding that air traffic personnel never completely lost radar or communications as they guided thousands of planes to landings. Duffy said the immediate problem had been fixed and that flying was safe, but warned that a broader overhaul of the air traffic control system was needed to prevent similar failures. Earlier on Friday, before the outage, the White House and Department of Transportation had urged Congress to approve $30.1 billion to upgrade aged airports and air traffic control infrastructure. "What we have is an incredibly old air traffic control system," Duffy said. "Give us the money to fix it." Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was "zero evidence" so far that the outage resulted from a cyberattack or a rogue AI system, though investigators had not ruled out either possibility. The National Security Agency was working with the Department of Homeland Security on the investigation, he added. PAIN FOR PASSENGERS From Boston to Seattle and New York to Los Angeles, passengers on Friday night crowded departure halls and airline desks as delays and cancellations mounted and aircraft remained parked at gates. "I might cry at some point but not yet,” said Louise Maher, 47, who was stuck at Newark Liberty International Airport after the aviation meltdown disrupted her British Airways flight to London. Because the FAA was responsible for the delays, airlines are not required to provide compensation to stranded passengers. The only other nationwide ground stop since the September 11 attacks came in January 2023, when the FAA halted domestic departures for about 90 minutes. Investors were already pricing in a financial hit to airlines. Shares of American, United and Delta fell between 1% and 2% in after-hours trading late Friday, while JetBlue Airways dropped about 3%.