Thousands of Travelers Still Stranded After FAA Lifts Nationwide Ground Stop

Thousands of travelers remained stranded on Nov. 14 as airlines worked to restore service after a nationwide ground stop halted departures for more than four hours, disrupting travel across the United States and beyond.

More than 3,300 flights within, into, or out of the United States were canceled Saturday morning, with more than 1,000 delayed, according to FlightAware. Those disruptions followed 9,134 cancellations and 7,038 delays on Friday. Another 53 flights were already canceled for Sunday.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) lifted the ground stop around 8:15 p.m. ET Friday, allowing departures to resume gradually. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that airlines would need time to restore normal operations.

“It’s going to be slow,” Duffy told reporters at the White House. He said tens of thousands of passengers remained stuck at airports after the restrictions were lifted, potentially facing overnight waits.

Duffy blamed an “incredibly old” air traffic control system for the outage, saying routers became overloaded with data and began to malfunction, prompting officials to order a shutdown.

“Let’s invest so we never have to come at 8:30 at night and have a press conference on why air travel was shut down, why we have tens of thousands of people in airports separated from their families without any knowledge of where they’re going to sleep tonight,” Duffy said.

He urged Congress to include $50 billion in an emergency funding bill before the end of the year to finish building a new system.

“With a brand-new state-of-the-art system, you won’t have these outages,” he said. “This is a continual problem that we have and it should be fixed.”

FAA Says Systems Tested

The FAA said in a late Friday statement that it had tested its systems before reopening the airspace for commercial flights.

“Before clearing flights to resume, we thoroughly tested our systems to confirm they were stable and that operations remain reliable,” the agency said on social media platform X, advising passengers to contact their airlines for updates.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said new equipment and technology that the FAA had been adding to the network was “overwhelming the older system.” Duffy said controllers lost consistent radar and communication with aircraft, and that the upgraded digital equipment did not fail, only the old analog equipment.

Mullin said more than 3,000 flights landed safely Friday and that no one was in danger.

He said attackers typically claim responsibility for cyberattacks and that investigators had picked up “no chatter.”

“We haven’t seen any footprints, as you would say, or identifications of people that got into the system,” Mullin told reporters at the White House. “It appears that this was mechanically driven; however, we’re still looking, so we’re not going to rule that out.”

Asked by a reporter what caused the instability, Duffy again pointed to the equipment.

“We have old switches, old routers. We use 1980s little copper lines. It’s an old system that went down and went down everywhere,” Duffy said. “It got overloaded.”

Duffy said lawmakers had approved only part of the money needed and warned that more outages would follow unless Congress funded the rest.

“We were able to review what went wrong, and then reboot the system and go. But you will have more of these,” he said.

The FAA has replaced thousands of copper wires with fiber-optic lines and upgraded hundreds of radio systems under an overhaul begun last year after Congress approved $12.5 billion.

Duffy said the White House has asked lawmakers to approve another $30 billion to complete the work, adding that more is warranted.

“I want $50 billion,” he said, arguing that this would be money well spent to stand up a national air traffic control system that “actually works.”

Although the ground stop was lifted, the disruption for passengers continued. At airports across the country, travelers crowded departure halls and airline desks as delays and cancellations mounted.

Edward Kargbo, 50, from West Chester, Pennsylvania, said he planned to spend the night at the airport after his transatlantic flight to Africa was rescheduled from 9 p.m. Friday to 6 a.m. on Saturday.

“I have to squat the night here,” he said. “I’m stranded.”

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.