Lengthy queues stretching in front of the counters, improvised camping in the departure halls, display boards speckled with the red of cancellations… “It’s frankly a mess,” sums up Lisa Beraid, “exhausted” and “frustrated” at New York’s LaGuardia Airport.
Her flight was delayed and then canceled on Friday; she was rerouted onto a flight scheduled for Saturday morning, which was ultimately canceled, and “now we won’t leave before Monday,” she tells AFP.
After 12,000 flights were canceled on Friday, more than 5,000 flights have suffered the same fate on Saturday across the United States, according to the FlightAware tracking site.
Authorities, who ruled out any cyberattack, expect a return to normal by Sunday evening, once the disorganization among crews and aircraft is resolved.
Also read – Flight suspensions in the United States: U.S. airspace has reopened
Everything began on Friday afternoon when the U.S. aviation regulator, the FAA, suddenly barred takeoffs across the entire country—a decision seldom taken.
“We were on the tarmac and couldn’t return to a gate because other planes were occupying them,” recalls Pat Curlett, a Ford employee visiting New York, who was about to depart for Detroit (to the north).
“We probably spent nearly three hours on the tarmac before deboarding. And we’ve been camping here for 18 hours since last night,” adds the sixtysomething to AFP, speaking from LaGuardia Airport.
The disruption was caused by routine works on infrastructure related to air traffic control, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy explained on Saturday.
Following the replacement of an old copper communications line with fiber optic, a router failed and, in a cascade effect, this “caused problems in communications with aircraft” and also affected radars, he said during a press briefing.
“This instability began to spread,” said FAA chief Bryan Bedford, “and that’s when we decided to halt takeoffs as a precaution.” He apologized to travelers for the inconvenience.
The minister, who has long denounced the aging American air-traffic control facilities, pointed the finger at the company carrying out the work.
“We will hold people accountable,” he declared, after his press conference began late due to a technical problem.
Funding Request
Coinciding with the incident, the White House had just days earlier asked lawmakers to approve an additional $30.1 billion to modernize the system.
“The president asked for $30 billion. I want $50 billion,” Sean Duffy asserted on Friday night. “With a brand-new, ultramodern system, you won’t have these outages.”
Many Democratic lawmakers criticized the move, pointing out that Donald Trump—who has not yet spoken on the matter—could have acted sooner, given he has held a congressional majority for nearly two years and until the end of the year.
Kathy Hochul, the Democratic governor of New York State, called for the minister’s resignation. “Chronic shortages of air traffic controllers and repeated failures in communications, serious breakdowns in our air system have become commonplace under Sean Duffy’s authority,” she wrote on X.
The suspension of all takeoffs like on Friday is rare. Such a decision had last occurred in 2023 due to a computer outage and, before that, on September 11, 2001.
