Travelers Scrambling at SoCal Airports After FAA Ground Stop

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U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Friday night at the White House that aging air traffic control equipment and data-overloaded routers triggered the disruption.

Travelers at Southland airports were being advised to expect continued delays and check with their airlines today after Friday’s roughly four-hour nationwide ground stop for all air traffic.

The Federal Aviation Administration’s order was lifted Friday at about 5:30 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, but widespread delays and cancellations were expected to continue affecting travelers until late Sunday.

Los Angeles International Airport, John Wayne Airport, Hollywood/Burbank Airport and Long Beach Airport were all advising travelers to reach out to the individual airlines for information about specific flights.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Friday night at the White House that aging air traffic control equipment and data-overloaded routers triggered the disruption.

“What we have is an incredibly old air traffic control system,” Duffy said at a news conference. “Our routers actually got overloaded with data.”

Duffy said the routers began providing inconsistent data, prompting the FAA to shut down the system as a safety precaution. He said some routers had been replaced, but older hardware failed.

“In at least one of our remote FAA locations, a contractor was doing routine maintenance to switch telecommunication lines from old copper wire, and they were bringing it over to fiber,” the secretary said. “Either through contractor error or a faulty piece of equipment, that router that was being replaced as we switched from copper to fiber, it started flooding other routers in our air traffic control system. So specifically, we had over 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds, and what that did was gave us issues with our communication with airplanes, and it also caused some disruption with our radar feeds.”

Administration officials continued to insist that there was no indication the technical problems were the work of a cyber attack.

“We see zero evidence of anything nefarious, and zero evidence of anything AI-related.

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