Transport chief blames US-wide flight disruptions on upgrade of old copper wiring

Weary travellers braced for more flight disruptions on Saturday as service resumed from US airports after an hours-long stoppage that the Trump administration blamed on faulty equipment or an error by a contractor tasked with switching out old copper wire communication lines.

Friday’s nationwide ground stop sparked widespread chaos and left hundreds of thousands of passengers in limbo, with some pulled off planes moments before departure by airline staff who appeared in the dark about unfolding events.

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

Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) chief Bryan Bedford said that 12,000 flights were cancelled on Friday and between four and five thousand flights out of 41,000 scheduled for Saturday were likely to be cancelled as well.

Speaking at a news conference in Washington, he offered a “sincere apology to the American travelling public”.

Transport Secretary Sean Duffy said Friday’s 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embarrassment, Saturday’s news conference – where administration officials also appealed for more funds to upgrade outdated systems – was delayed due to technical problems with the audio feed.

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

The nationwide halt was lifted at 8.15pm.

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

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

Early on Saturday, he sought to assure Americans it remained “safe to fly” but warned it would take time to resume normal service.

“You will continue to see some delays and cancellations as carriers reschedule flights and reposition aircraft/crews where they are needed most,” Duffy posted on social media.

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

At La Guardia airports, 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, early on Saturday.

“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.”

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

Duffy appealed for US$50 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 social media. “Trump and Republicans have controlled Congress and could have funded the system.”

US lawmakers called for investigations into what caused the massive disruption and whether the country was adequately secure from cybercriminality.

“No more kicking the can,” Republican Senator Eric Schmitt said on social media.

“If today proves anything, it’s that we need to update our air traffic control system & rebuild our airport infrastructure.”

US President Donald Trump was uncharacteristically quiet about the outage that had knock-on effects for international flights to and from the United States.

As of midday Saturday, he had made no public statement about the ground stop.