Airlines canceled thousands more flights Saturday as they recovered from Friday’s domestic shutdown, but the FAA said schedules should return to normal by the end of Sunday.
More than 4,600 U.S. flights had been canceled as of 1:34 p.m. ET as of Saturday, according to FlightAware. That’s at the high end of the 4,000 to 5,000 predicted by FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford. Flight tracking app Flighty said the outage has now caused more cancellations than the CrowdStrike software outage of 2024. “I think the worst is behind us,” Bedford said, apologizing to travelers.
The FAA halted departures nationwide for more than four hours Friday, the longest stopover since the attacks of September 11, 2001. About 12,000 flights could not be made, Bedford said.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the outage began while L3Harris Technologies, which manages the network, was doing routine work to switch lines from copper wire to fiber at a remote FAA site. A router involved in the work flooded the rest of the system, disrupting communications with aircraft and radars. Duffy said officials were working to determine “whether we had incompetence” on the part of the contractor or a faulty router. “Until I can build” a new network, he said, “I’m stuck with L3Harris.” Bedford said the review will determine whether the router was installed or configured incorrectly, or if it was simply defective.
In a statement to Yahoo News, L3Harris said it “supports the FAA in its investigation” and “takes seriously the nationwide ground stop and its impact on travelers, airlines and air traffic operations.” The company did not respond to Duffy’s criticism or indicate what was wrong.
When asked why the work was carried out on a Friday afternoon, Duffy said work on small, remote sites was carried out during the day as it should not affect the overall system. “There will be a reassessment of when we do this work,” he said. Bedford said network maintenance is recorded on paper, so officials had to search paper records to find out who was working where.
Nick Daniels, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, told Yahoo News that communications with some planes were interrupted during the outage and controllers moved flights to working frequencies. Asked if work like Friday’s should be done during the day, he said: “If the worst outcome is that we lose all our frequencies, well, then this work should be done when there are the fewest planes in the sky.”
Network problems are not new. A safety review ordered by the FAA in 2023 called it obsolete, CBS News reported. In 2009, a technician at L3Harris’ predecessor, Harris Corp., misconfigured a router when switching the network to fiber optics, disrupting 129 air traffic facilities, according to a study by the Transportation Department’s inspector general.
Duffy is lobbying Congress for more money to replace the system. President Trump has asked for $30 billion, and Duffy has said he wants $50 billion, on top of the $12.5 billion approved by Congress last year. Bedford said the router swap was routine maintenance and not part of this modernization effort.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul on Saturday called on Duffy to resign. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat and ranking member of an aviation subcommittee, called for an investigation.
Travelers whose flights have been canceled must be refunded if they choose not to travel, and most major airlines offer travel waivers. Airlines’ hotel and meal promises generally only cover disruptions within their control, which does not include an FAA ground stop.
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