Thousands of flights still canceled as officials blamed ageing air control system for nationwide grounding
Travel chaos continued across the US on Saturday morning as airlines scrambled to recover from a four-hour nationwide Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ground stop that delayed or canceled thousands of the flights.
On Saturday morning, more than 3,000 flights within, into or out of the US had already been canceled, according to FlightAware.
The longest nationwide group stop in 25 years left passengers stranded at airports across the country, with no certainty about exactly when they may reach their intended destination.
The US transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, on Friday blamed the ground stop on an ageing air control system, saying 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.
The US homeland security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, said on Friday that there was “no indication as of yet” that the communications failure had been caused by “a nefarious attack against us”.
Duffy warned that it would “take us time” to “resume normal operations”.
“Our top priority is the safety of you and your family when you fly,” he said.
