US Air Travel Slowly Recovers After Nationwide Ground Stop as Disruptions Persist
Thousands of flights were canceled or delayed across the United States after a four-hour FAA ground stop, with officials blaming aging air traffic control equipment.
By Amir Navarro ·
Air travel across the United States remained disrupted on Saturday morning as airlines worked to recover from a four-hour nationwide ground stop ordered by the Federal Aviation Administration, which delayed or canceled thousands of flights.
According to FlightAware, more than 3,000 flights within, into or out of the US had already been canceled by Saturday morning. The grounding, the longest nationwide stop in 25 years, left passengers stranded at airports across the country with no clear sense of when they might reach their destinations.
Transportation secretary Sean Duffy said on Friday that the ground stop was caused by an aging air traffic control system, explaining that the air traffic communications equipment became "overloaded with data and .. they started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers". "Because of that, we shut the system down," the Trump administration official said.
Homeland security secretary Markwayne Mullin said on Friday there was "no indication as of yet" that the communications failure was the result of "a nefarious attack against us". Duffy cautioned that it would "take us time" to "resume normal operations", adding: "Our top priority is the safety of you and your family when you fly."
The rare grounding upended travel plans nationwide, with more than 8,000 flights canceled on Friday alone. Sports teams traveling for weekend games were among those affected. The Southeastern Conference announced that Mississippi's college football game against Oklahoma was rescheduled to Sunday, a day typically set aside for the National Football League. A men's college basketball game between the University of North Carolina Greensboro and Cornell University, scheduled for Saturday, was postponed.
Although flights began resuming once the FAA lifted the ground stop, disruptions were still reported at airports in major cities including Boston, Washington DC, New York and Miami. In a statement on Saturday, Duffy said that "operations are slowly returning to normal this morning" but warned that "you will continue to see some delays and cancellations as carriers reschedule flights and reposition aircraft/crews where they are needed most".
"Our top priority right now is making sure travelers get home safely to their families as quickly as possible," Duffy said, adding that he planned to hold a news briefing at 10.30am ET.
The UK Civil Aviation Authority also issued a statement on Saturday morning, cautioning that "while US flights have resumed, there may be some follow-on disruption as airlines work to re-book affected passengers and get all services back to normal". It advised anyone due to travel on flights between the UK and USA to check with their airline before heading to the airport.
During a Friday evening news briefing, Trump administration officials urged Congress, which until January is controlled by the White House's Republican allies, to "fully fund a full build of a brand new air traffic control system". Friday marked the third nationwide ground stop issued by the FAA this century, following one after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks and another in January 2023 when a pilot notification system went down.
