Duffy said officials are investigating whether the contractor’s “incompetence” or a faulty router was the cause. “Our contractor didn’t meet the timing or the equipment didn’t meet the timing,” he added.
L3Harris said it supports the FAA in its investigation to “understand the conditions” that led to the ground stop.
“L3Harris takes seriously the nationwide ground shutdown and its impact on travelers, airlines and air traffic operations,” it said in a statement.
The nationwide shutdown was the first since January 2023, when a key FAA computer system that sends notifications to pilots crashed, and the second since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Andrew Charlton, an aviation consultant, said Friday’s shutdown affected about a quarter of the 45,000 daily flights in the United States.
“The ripple effect is incredible,” said Charlton, chief executive of Aviation Advocacy. “The plane doesn’t just fly from point A to point B and back… then stop. It then moves to C then to E and turns and turns and turns. This is of course exacerbated if you’re talking about long-haul flights, international flights over the Atlantic or the Pacific.”
Thousands of flights delayed and canceled
Passengers at airports across the United States were still struggling to figure out how to get to their destinations on Saturday. Some waited for the chaos in hotels to end, others ran to collect rental cars and bus or train tickets. Many were forced to camp at airports.
Others got creative. A video from the Seattle airport showed a passenger serenading stressed travelers with classical music. Stranded strangers participated in a cornhole tournament at the airport in Lexington, Kentucky. Singer T-Pain and the band Hoobastank were filmed singing to passengers as they waited on commercial planes.
Dan Russell, 66, learned that his connecting flight from Kona, Hawaii, to Fresno, California, had been canceled a half-hour before he was scheduled to board in San Diego Friday evening. The hotels were full, so he and his wife waited at the airport for a modified flight.
“There’s nothing you can do,” Russell said.
A cheerful Southwest Airlines gate agent at Dallas Love Field greeted passengers at dawn with “Hello, hello,” then repeatedly declared that all flights were full and asked passengers to have their boarding passes ready to help keep flights moving.
Transportation Secretary Duffy Says Flights Can Resume After FAA Ground Shutdown
At the airport in Newark, New Jersey, Umi Egchi was trying to figure out when his flights would line up so he could return home to Japan.
“I don’t know exactly what happened. I just want to go home,” said Egchi, who had a sleeping mask on his head.
Sports teams that traveled for games this weekend adjusted game start times, and No. 19 Mississippi’s game at Oklahoma was delayed a full day to Sunday.
FlightAware, a website that tracks flights, said more than 6,000 flights within, to or from the United States were canceled on Saturday.
Authorities say no one was in danger during ground check
Duffy reiterated Saturday that no one was in danger since more than 3,000 flights in the air at the time of the grounding order had landed safely.
Delays mount at Logan Airport as FAA grounds flights nationwide
Trump administration officials have also criticized Congress for failing to approve more funding to replace decades-old technology that helps manage U.S. air traffic. Duffy said 70 percent of the system has been replaced with fiber optic wire, but his agency also needs new air traffic control towers and new runways.
The FAA replaced thousands of old copper wires with fiber optic lines and upgraded hundreds of radio systems as part of an overhaul that began last year after Congress approved $12.5 billion in funding. Duffy and the White House are asking for an additional $30 billion to complete the work.
“We have aging infrastructure throughout the airspace,” Duffy said, while emphasizing that flights remain safe. “You won’t get to your destination if we don’t think you can get there safely. »
Charlton, the aviation consultant, highlighted the difficulties of updating a system that can never go down.
“What you’re looking at here is trying to change the tires on your car while the car is going 80 miles an hour on the highway, because there’s no stopping in aviation,” Charlton said.
Although Duffy said he has spoken with President Donald Trump several times since the mission began, the president has remained largely silent on the subject. He has not spoken publicly on the matter or made any statements via social media, although he has commented on other things. He spoke on the phone with a Fox News reporter, but it was not filmed.
Past problems have been linked to equipment failures
The problem appeared similar to a regional air traffic control communications outage in September that halted hundreds of flights across the Northeast. This disruption was linked to the fact that a construction crew had cut a fiber optic line.
Aging equipment was also blamed for brief radar outages last year that disrupted Newark Airport.
Aviation safety expert Steve Arroyo said Friday the difference was the nationwide scale of the disruption, which left controllers unable to reliably speak to pilots.
“If you don’t have that capability, whether it’s because the old cables they have are just dilapidated or for whatever reason, you have to stop the planes on the ground and not get them in the air, where you might not be able to communicate with them anymore,” said Arroyo, a former United Airlines pilot.
Funk reported from Omaha, Nebraska and Golden from Seattle. Associated Press journalists David Keyton in Berlin; Stephen Hawkins in Dallas; Mead Gruver in Fort Collins, Colo.; Jessica Hill in Las Vegas; Ali Swenson in Chicago; Alex Veiga and Jaimie Ding in Los Angeles; Seung Min Kim and Aamer Madhani in Washington; Hannah Schoenbaum in Salt Lake City; and Brian Melley in London contributed to this report.
Gn usa
