Nationwide US Flight Stop Ends; Duffy Asks Congress for $50 Billion
A nationwide US flight stop ended Friday night, but delays and cancellations continue. What caused it, what airlines owe travelers and what Duffy wants.
A nationwide halt on departures in the United States ended Friday at about 8:15 p.m., and domestic flights began taking off again, El Financiero reported, citing EFE and Bloomberg. US officials say getting air traffic back to normal after the longest flight stoppage in 25 years will take time, and cancellations carried over into Saturday.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has asked Congress for $50 billion in emergency money to modernize the country’s air traffic control system. For residents of Mexico City with trips north planned, the disruption comes just before the Thanksgiving travel rush, although officials expect the system to be running normally by then.
What caused the US ground stop
Duffy and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said new software patches installed across the system overloaded old routers with data. According to Duffy, that led to “intermittent” communications with air traffic control and gaps in the radar signals used to guide aircraft. Flights stayed grounded for more than four hours. Staff are still investigating.
On Saturday, Duffy ruled out a cyberattack. He said the trouble started while a contractor from L3Harris, a company that works for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), was doing routine maintenance to replace old copper wiring with fiber optic cable. Officials have not yet determined whether the cause was human error, a faulty installation or a defective router, Duffy said.
He also suggested that more outages could happen. “We didn’t think we’d have this kind of system failure,” he said, adding that it happened anyway.
What it means for travelers
Thousands of flights were canceled in the United States on Saturday and hundreds more were delayed, according to FlightAware, a website that tracks flight disruptions. The FAA told passengers to contact their airlines for the status of their flights.
Airlines must offer a free rebooking on another flight to travelers who still want to go. Passengers whose flight was canceled and who decide not to travel are entitled to a refund.
Mullin said international flights are being handled case by case. San Francisco’s airport said flights across the Pacific, including to Hawaii and Asia, were cleared to leave starting Friday night. At the FAA’s request, Europe’s aviation agency suspended US-bound departures from 5 p.m. Eastern time on Friday until midnight. The sources did not say how flights between Mexico and the United States were affected.
Duffy’s funding request to Congress
Speaking at a White House press conference on Friday, Duffy called the situation an emergency and said the request for emergency funds should have support from both parties. He had recently asked for about $30 billion to keep his agency’s upgrade project going.
Work to modernize US air traffic control began last year after Congress approved an initial round of funding. Duffy and the White House are now pushing for $30 billion more to finish it, on top of the new $50 billion emergency request.
What happens next
Officials expect the knock-on effects of the stoppage to last for days, and they say the system will likely be back to normal in time for the Thanksgiving travel increase. The investigation into the exact failure at the FAA system continues, and Congress has not yet acted on Duffy’s request.
Source: El Financiero
