NEW YORK, Nov 15 — US air travel was expected to return to normal on Sunday after a nationwide ground stop left hundreds of thousands of passengers in limbo and disrupted travel worldwide.

The Trump administration blamed Friday’s ground stop – meaning no planes can take off – on a botched replacement of old copper wire communication lines.

Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) chief Bryan Bedford said that 12,000 flights were cancelled on Friday, while tracking website FlightAware showed more than 6,600 cancelled flights on Saturday.

As of Sunday morning, FlightAware had recorded more than 1,200 cancelled flights.

Speaking at a news conference in Washington, Bedford predicted a full resumption of flight schedules by “close of business on Sunday.”

During the outage, footage from airports showed gates full, with planes waiting on taxiways and passengers thronging concourses, desperate for information.

“Tired. Exhausted. Frustrated. Yeah, you know, it’s just a mess, right?” Lisa Beraid, 48, who works for an insurance company, told AFP as she waited for a flight on Saturday morning at New York’s LaGuardia airport.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the four-hour ground stop was declared after maintenance work to upgrade an old copper wire to a high-speed fibre cable had caused “issues” with communication with planes and radar feeds.

“Either through contractor error or a faulty piece of equipment… it started flooding other routers in our air traffic control system,” Duffy told reporters.

In another embarrassment, Saturday’s news conference – where administration officials appealed for more funds to upgrade outdated systems – was delayed due to technical problems with the audio feed.

Returning to normal

Friday’s disruption was only the second time such a ground stop had been issued in US airspace – which is among the busiest in the world – since the 9/11 attacks.

The nationwide halt was lifted at 8.15pm Eastern Time Friday (0115 GMT Saturday).

FAA officials reopened the airspace “after restoring full functionality” at air traffic control facilities, according to Duffy.

Tim Johnson, consumer director at the UK Civil Aviation Authority, said although US flights have resumed, there could be “some follow-on disruption” as airlines re-book passengers and get all services back to normal.

At LaGuardia airport, some travellers were more sanguine than others about the continued disruption of their flights.

“We’re stuck here for the next, I don’t know, 36 hours,” said Pat Curlett, a 62-year-old Ford worker.

“No one expects the whole airline system to go down,” said 77-year-old traveller Steven Rathe, who was waiting to embark on a four-leg trip from New York to Albuquerque.

“We’re lucky it wasn’t longer. So they’re flying today and for that I’m grateful.”

Ageing infrastructure

The ground stop not only plunged US air travel into chaos – it also raised serious concerns about the country’s ageing infrastructure.

Duffy appealed for US$50 billion (RM204.5 billion) in funds to upgrade and modernise the air traffic control system, and called for Congress, which controls the purse strings of the US government, to “meet this moment.”

“Cut the crap,” retorted Illinois state governor and prominent Democrat JB Pritzker on X. “Trump and Republicans have controlled Congress and could have funded the system.”

New York Governor Kathy Hochul called on Duffy to resign or be fired by Trump, writing on X: “We’re fortunate no lives were lost.”

US lawmakers called for investigations into what caused the massive disruption and whether the country is adequately secure from cyber criminality.

“If today proves anything, it’s that we need to update our air traffic control system & rebuild our airport infrastructure,” Republican Senator Eric Schmitt said on X.

President Donald Trump was uncharacteristically quiet about the outage that had knock-on effects for international flights to and from the United States, making no public statement about the ground stop as of Sunday morning. — AFP