Airlines scrambled Sunday to return flight schedules to normal by the evening, two days after a nationwide ground stop triggered widespread cancellations and delays across the United States.
While thousands of flights were disrupted this weekend, with over a thousand more cancellations reported Sunday, airlines worked to reposition aircraft and crews, after officials expressed confidence that the worst of the disruption is over.
Federal Aviation Administration Administrator Bryan Bedford said airlines expect “they’ll be able to have a full schedule integrity by the close of business on Sunday.”
“I do think the worst is behind us,” he said at a news conference Saturday.
The flight-tracking website FlightAware reported that more than 6,600 flights within, into or out of the U.S. were canceled on Saturday, with at least 1,300 additional cancellations recorded early Sunday.
American Airlines said all planned cancellations for Saturday night and Sunday had been completed, although some individual flights could still be canceled as it works to restore operations.
American also indicated that its cargo operations were expected to return to normal Sunday.
Other carriers issued a more cautious update. Delta Air Lines said it was continuing to restore its operations but advising customers with flexible travel plans to move their flights to Monday or later because of the potential for further disruption Sunday.
Alaska Airlines said Saturday that it was working to restore normal operations but warned that aircraft and crew members had been left out of position as a result of the disruption and cancellations. The airline said it would take time to get its schedule back on track over the weekend but did not give a specific time frame for a return to normal service.
The FAA’s ground stop on Friday afternoon marked the first time flights across the entire country had been halted since January 2023, when a computer system failure affected the agency’s pilot alerting system. Before that, the last nationwide ground stop had been imposed following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
In the latest shutdown, flights were halted for more than four hours before restrictions were lifted around 8:15 p.m. Friday.
Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy said the outage was believed to have been caused by problems during maintenance at a remote FAA site, where a contractor was replacing old copper telecommunications lines with fiber-optic cables.
“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.”
L3Harris said in a statement Saturday that the company “is supporting the FAA in its investigation to understand the conditions that led to the Nov. 13 ground stop of our nation’s air travel.”
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