US Federal Aviation Administration officials and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on Saturday said that investigations are ongoing in an attempt to find the cause of the largest mass grounding of flights in the country in over 25 years.
Stranded passengers scrambled to find hotel rooms or buses and trains that could take them to their destinations, others hunkered down in the nation's airports in the first such nationwide grounding since January 2023 and the largest since the September 11, 2001, terror attacks.
International carriers were also forced to cancel flights to the US, and the massive backlog prompted, among other things, the rescheduling of dozens of college and professional sporting events — a staple of many Americans' weekends.
FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said that a total of 16,000 flights had been delayed on Friday and Saturday, adding that he hoped flight schedules would be back to normal sometime Sunday, saying the "worst is behind us."
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Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said no evidence of malfeasance had been found, before pointing his finger at numerous possible culprits, starting with the previous administration, then Congress and eventually settling on possible "contractor incompetence."
