New York (AFP) – Weary travelers braced for more flight disruptions Saturday as service resumed from US airports after an hours-long stoppage that the Trump administration blamed on faulty equipment or an error by a contractor tasked with switching out old copper wire communication lines. Friday’s nationwide ground stop sparked widespread chaos and left hundreds of thousands of passengers in limbo, with some pulled off planes moments before departure by airline staff who appeared in the dark about unfolding events.
“Tired. Exhausted. Frustrated. Yeah, you know, it’s just a mess, right?” Lisa Beraid, 48, who works for an insurance company, told AFP, as she waited for a flight Saturday morning at New York’s La Guardia airport. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) chief Bryan Bedford said that 12,000 flights were canceled on Friday and between four and five thousand flights out of 41,000 scheduled for Saturday were likely to be canceled as well. Speaking at a news conference in Washington, he offered a “sincere apology to the American traveling public.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Friday’s four-hour ground stop was declared after maintenance work to upgrade an old copper wire to a high-speed fiber cable had caused “issues” with communication with airplanes and radar feeds. “Either through contractor error or a faulty piece of equipment…it started flooding other routers in our air traffic control system,” Duffy told reporters. In another embarrassment, Saturday’s news conference — where administration officials also appealed for more funds to upgrade outdated systems — was delayed due to technical problems with the audio feed.
Returning to normal, Friday’s disruption was only the second time such a ground stoppage had been issued in US airspace — which is among the busiest in the world — since the 9/11 attacks. The nationwide halt was lifted at 8:15 pm Eastern Time (0115 GMT Saturday). During the outage, footage from airports showed gates full, with planes waiting on taxiways and passengers thronging concourses, desperate for information. FAA officials reopened the airspace “after restoring full functionality” at air traffic control facilities, according to Duffy.
Early Saturday, he sought to assure Americans it remains “safe to fly” but warned it would take time to resume normal service. “You will continue to see some delays and cancellations as carriers reschedule flights and reposition aircraft/crews where they are needed most,” Duffy posted on X. Tim Johnson, consumer director at the UK Civil Aviation Authority, said 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.”
At La Guardia airport, some travelers were more sanguine than others about the continued disruption of their flights. “We’re stuck here for the next, I don’t know, 36 hours,” said Pat Curlett, a 62-year-old Ford worker, early Saturday. “No one expects the whole airline system to go down,” said 77-year-old traveler Steven Rathe, who was waiting to embark on a four-leg trip from New York to Albuquerque. “We’re lucky it wasn’t longer. So they’re flying today and for that I’m grateful.”
The ground stop not only plunged US air travel into chaos, it has raised serious concerns about the country’s aging infrastructure. Duffy appealed for $50 billion in funds to upgrade and modernize the air traffic control system, and called for Congress, which controls the purse-strings of the US government, to “meet this moment.”
“Cut the crap,” retorted Illinois state governor and prominent Democrat, JB Pritzker, on X. “Trump and Republicans have controlled Congress and could have funded the system.” US lawmakers called for investigations into what caused the massive disruption and whether the country is adequately secure from cyber criminality. “No more kicking the can,” Republican Senator Eric Schmitt said on X. “If today proves anything, it’s that we need to update our air traffic control system & rebuild our airport infrastructure.”
President Donald Trump was uncharacteristically quiet about the outage that had knock-on effects for international flights to and from the United States. As of midday Saturday, he had made no public statement about the ground stop.
© 2024 AFP
