Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy said that the problem that led to a nationwide halt of air travel on Friday was caused by either bad equipment or an error as a contractor sought to replace old copper telecommunications lines with fiber at a remote Federal Aviation Administration facility.
“What we’re working to determine was whether we had incompetence, meaning, was it user error?” Duffy said at a news conference Saturday, referring to the contractor, L3Harris. “Or did they install a faulty router? We haven’t determined what the fault was.”
Duffy said that the problem led to “over 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds. And what that did was [it] gave us issues with our communication with airplanes. And it also caused some disruption with our radar feeds.”
“This was an FAA system that didn’t meet the moment — our contractor didn’t meet the moment or the equipment didn’t meet at the moment and caused the outages,” he said, urging Congress to approve more funding for upgrades.
L3Harris did not respond to requests for comment Friday night and Saturday.
Travel chaos continued into the weekend following Friday’s rare nationwide ground stop, with thousands of fresh flight cancellations Saturday and international authorities warning that flights to and from the United States could be disrupted.
Bryan Bedford, the FAA administrator, said Saturday that “the worst is behind us” and that flights around the country should be back on schedule by the end of the weekend, following Friday’s national ground stop.
Bedford said the FAA anticipates that between 4,000 and 5,000 of the roughly 41,000 flights scheduled on Saturday likely will be canceled. He said the FAA estimates that 12,000 flights — including 9,000 commercial flights and 3,000 private or general aviation flights — were canceled on Friday.
AirNav Radar posted a video showing U.S. air traffic on Friday and Nov. 6 side by side, showing the striking impact of the ground stop.
Customers are entitled to a refund of the ticket price in the event an airline cancels a flight, and the traveler chooses not to accept travel, vouchers or other forms of compensation, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. Passengers are also entitled to refunds if they are subject to a significant delay or changes.
Friday’s ground stop caused confusion at airports and in the air. It marks the first time national airspace has been closed since January 2023, when the FAA system for distributing urgent safety messages to pilots and dispatchers went down.
The ground stop came amid an effort by Trump administration officials to upgrade air traffic systems nationwide, including by introducing an artificial intelligence-powered tool for airspace planning that has sparked bipartisan concern. Earlier this month, the FAA also said it would replace technology relying on “decades-old floppy disks” with a modern system.
Liam Scott and Maegan Vazquez contributed to this report.
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