U.S. aviation officials said the domestic flight schedule is expected to normalize by the end of Sunday after a nationwide ground stop caused thousands of cancellations and delays.
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The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said on Saturday that air travel should be back to normal by the end of Sunday, two days after what the agency described as the nation’s longest ground stop in 25 years.
FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford told reporters in Washington that airlines “will still have delays and cancellations” on Saturday, but he said “the worst is behind us.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the disruption began when contractor L3Harris Technologies Inc. was replacing a section of an air traffic control system’s old copper wire with new fiber wiring. He said the work led to “intermittent” communications and radar gaps, prompting the government to shut down air traffic for more than four hours.
Duffy said officials were investigating whether the cause was a possible faulty router, rather than faulty wire.
L3Harris said in a statement that it was supporting the FAA’s investigation and that it “takes the nationwide ground stop and its impact on travelers, airlines and air traffic operations seriously.”
Officials said no one was in danger during the grounding order. Duffy said more than 3,000 flights in the air at the time of the order landed safely.
The FAA said the ground stop was the first since January 2023, when an FAA computer system that sends notices to pilots malfunctioned, and the second since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
In its update on Saturday, FlightAware reported that more than 5,100 flights within, into or out of the U.S. were cancelled.
Duffy also linked the disruption to aging air traffic technology, saying that while 70% of the system had been replaced with fiber optic wire, additional upgrades are still needed, including new air traffic control towers and runways.
He said the overhaul began last year after Congress approved $12.5 billion in funding, and he and the White House are pushing for $30 billion more to complete the work.
Aviation consultant Andrew Charlton said Friday’s stoppage affected about a quarter of the roughly 45,000 flights in the U.S. each day, creating major knock-on effects as aircraft move through multiple routes.
Aviation safety expert Steve Arroyo said the nationwide scale left controllers unable to reliably communicate with pilots, requiring authorities to keep planes on the ground rather than risk putting them in the air without dependable communications.
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