US officials say flight stoppage stemmed from ‘routine maintenance’ as travel chaos continues

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Thousands of flights still canceled as officials blamed ageing air control system for nationwide groundingThe Trump administration says Friday’s four-hour nationwide Federal…

Thousands of flights still canceled as officials blamed ageing air control system for nationwide grounding

The Trump administration says Friday’s four-hour nationwide Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ground stop that delayed or canceled thousands of flight stemmed from routine maintenance.

At a news briefing on Saturday, the US transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, said that the issues began when a contractor was performing “routine maintenance” at a remote FAA facility to “switch telecommunications lines” from copper wire to fiber optic cable.

“What we’re working to determine is whether we had incompetence,” Duffy said, “or did they install a faulty router.”

He added: “Once we were able to isolate the work that was being done at this remote location, all of our systems came back online,” and the ground stop was lifted.

At the briefing, the FAA’s head, Bryan Bedford, apologized to passengers and said he believed that the worst of the disruption “is behind us”.

“We will still have delays and cancellations today, but that will set us up for a full recovery tomorrow,” Bedford said. “Based on everything that we’re hearing from our airline partners, they believe that they’ll be able to have full schedule integrity by the close of business on Sunday.”

“I want to reiterate: we see zero evidence of anything nefarious, and zero evidence of anything AI-related,” he continued. “So we want to be clear that we have a equipment issue, and we’re working through what this defective piece of equipment was.”

Later on Saturday, L3Harris, the federal contractor that Duffy said was updating air traffic control equipment before the ground stop, released a statement saying that it took the ground stop and its negative effects “on travelers, airlines and air traffic operations seriously”.

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