Air travel schedules across the United States are on track to normalize by late Sunday after a nationwide ground stop grounded thousands of flights and created travel disruptions over the weekend.
The Federal Aviation Administration ordered the nationwide halt on Friday shortly after 1 p.m. Pacific Standard Time due to a communications issue affecting all 22 Air Route Traffic Control Centers, including the Palmdale center. Lasting more than four hours, it was the longest nationwide ground stop in the United States in 25 years.
The disruption continued into the weekend, with FlightAware reporting 17,670 delayed flights and 2,218 canceled flights nationally by late Sunday morning. Major carriers such as Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, and American Airlines cancelled about 20% of their flights, while JetBlue cancelled 40%.
Airlines had to scrub close to 10,000 trips and push back over 7,000 extra journeys because of the directive, marking one of the bleakest travel periods America has ever witnessed. Data from the tracking platform FlightAware around late Sunday morning showed 17,670 domestic flight delays alongside 2,218 cancellations nationwide, which included 246 delays and 73 cancellations at LAX.
At John Wayne Airport in Orange County, administrators logged 49 delays and 16 cancellations, whereas Hollywood/Burbank Airport recorded 36 delays and 11 cancellations, and Long Beach Airport registered 23 delays coupled with one cancellation.
Of the 41,000 flights scheduled Saturday, more than 6,600 were canceled, according to FlightAware. Aviation data provider Cirium reported that out of more than 26,000 flights planned for Sunday, a little over 1,300 did not take off.
Bryan Bedford, administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, said airlines “will still have delays and cancellations,” while promising that the “worst is behind us.”
Federal investigators traced the failure to a remote location where a contractor was replacing older copper wiring with new fiber-optic lines. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy explained that a computer router installed in El Dorado, Arkansas, began sending faulty signals that flooded the air traffic control network with over 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds.
“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.
Officials stated there was no indication of a cyberattack or foreign interference. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin reported that authorities saw zero signs connecting the malfunction to a cyberattack and confirmed that passenger safety was never compromised.
Prior to yesterday’s malfunction, the Department of Transportation and the White House had already pressed lawmakers to greenlight $30.1bn for modernizing outdated air traffic control networks and aging aviation facilities.
President Trump emphasized the need for rapid modernization on Truth Social on Sunday, urging US lawmakers to allocate the money, saying “we can get it built quickly and efficiently” and declaring that “It will be the BEST SYSTEM anywhere in the World.” Aviation analyst Miles O’Brien described the US system as “a house that’s about to be condemned” and said that “this is a system in the United States that we have allowed to decay”.
Earlier coverage: FAA Says Airlines Can Resume Flights After Ground Stop, but Delays Continue