US Lifts ground stop, but passengers face second day of flight disruption

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More than 1.5 million passengers face travel disruption as domestic and international airlines warn of knock-on delays.

More than 1.5 million air passengers have faced travel disruption after the United States halted departing flights nationwide for more than four hours, with airlines warning they would take days to recover.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) lifted the ground stop at 8:15pm Eastern time on Friday (01:15 GMT on Saturday), after a telecommunications outage affected the country’s 22 regional air traffic control centres. FlightRadar24 counted more than 4,700 cancellations and 10,000 delays on Friday, with 700 flights already cancelled for Saturday.

At Los Angeles airport, passenger Nicholas Erdodi, who had travelled from New Zealand to attend a conference in Chicago, told Al Jazeera he had spent six hours at the airport after being forced off his plane.

“The challenge is you cannot ask anyone here what to do,” he said. “The lack of information is what bothers me.” He had been rebooked, but was unsure whether his next flight would go.

Others affected included sport teams in the NBA, NHL and college football.

Todd Curtis, an aviation safety expert and chief executive of AirSafe.com, told Al Jazeera that the failures appeared to be concentrated in the country’s air route traffic control centres.

“There are 21 across the United States, one in Alaska and the other 20 in the lower 48,” he said.

“These are the folks who handle the aircraft that are transiting from one part of the country to the other, and they rely on multiple handoffs between controllers.”

US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said it would “take us some time” to restore capacity and that “we’re going to have some makeup to do.”

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