Pete Buttigieg kicked off his public remarks ahead of a concert on Friday night with a nod to the aviation chaos that was unfolding across America.
The former secretary of transportation was in Denver, Colorado, for a Democratic Party conference that was supposed to be a victory lap after the midterms.
“Mayor Pete” was scheduled to speak at 4 p.m. on Friday and took the stage not long after the FAA decided to ground all air traffic.
Former U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg speaks to the press after speaking at the “What’s Next” post-midterm election conference by the Democratic Party in Denver, Colorado, US Nov. 13, 2026.
“I’ll begin with a public service announcement,” he said affably. “I will be available in the hotel bar following the concert for anybody who needs to rebook their flights, or get a refund per your rights.”
The FAA lifted the ground stop—the most significant disruption to air travel in the United States since 9/11—a little over four hours later, just after 8 p.m.
After his remarks, Buttigieg held a brief press conference, saying the stoppage was very concerning.
A passenger wearing a cheese-shaped hat waits at a terminal after the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration issued a national ground stop “due to extraordinary circumstances and reasons for safety” on Nov. 13, 2026.
“Like everyone else, very concerned about what’s going on in the national airspace,” he began, before clarifying that he didn’t “claim to have any inside knowledge.”
“I’m a person watching this as a member of the traveling public who has a flight tomorrow, but I know that lots of people’s flights have been disrupted.”
He then praised the public servants working to fix the problem. “I imagine this is a very stressful day for them, but also they’re very dedicated public servants, and hopefully they will get this resolved quickly,” he said.
Asked by a journalist what he thought had gone wrong, Buttigieg said he didn’t know, but questioned how things could have gone so wrong.
“The system has many redundancies in it so that normally if there’s one point of failure, something else can catch it,” he said, referencing an outage that occurred when he was in office that left planes grounded for about an hour.
“It is not clear to me why that redundancy did not prevent an outage of this magnitude,” Buttigieg said.
This was the second nationwide ground stop since the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001. The other occurred in January 2023, when the FAA paused domestic departures for about 90 minutes over a system outage.
In that case, conservatives including Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert and Donald Trump Jr. blamed then-Transportation Secretary Buttigieg for the mess.
“This is what happens when you hire clueless liberals for jobs they aren’t qualified to do,” Boebert, who was ousted from Congress on Friday, wrote at the time on X.
Boebert’s reaction to a ground stop during the Biden administration resurfaced on Friday.
Trump Jr. added: “Yet another major blow to incompetent Transportation Sect Mayor Pete and people who get important jobs with no experience to check some identity politics boxes.”
Neither had publicly weighed in on Friday’s ground stop as of publication.
For its part, the Trump Administration put out no information on Friday about what was happening while planes were grounded, with the only source of information a report on Fox News about a phone call between Trump, 80, and Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy.
On the call Trump reportedly saidthe system had broken down because of its age and outdatedness.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy speaks as US Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin looks on in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House after the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s national ground stop, Nov. 13, 2026.
In a press conference after the stoppage had ended, Secretary for Transportation Sean Duffy and his counterpart at Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, denied the stoppage was due to an AI problem or cyberattack. They said it was due to aging infrastructure that needed to be updated.
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