Flights at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport were only slowly starting to move again on Friday after a rare nationwide ground stop that left hundreds of travelers stuck and threw airline schedules into disarray. Airport officials said it would take at least through Saturday morning for carriers to get back on track.
That is why Oregon Vs Ole Miss is being searched now in a very different context than a football matchup: a travel disruption rippled through Austin, and people trying to leave the city were suddenly stranded. At Austin-Bergstrom, at least 241 flights were delayed and another 95 were canceled on Friday, while hundreds more flights were delayed or canceled at other Texas airports.
Larissa Williams, who landed in Austin on Tuesday and had spent the last week on stage and speaking, was trying to get home to San Diego when the shutdown hit. “I’m trying to stay positive and put that energy out here, but I am literally exhausted,” she said. After learning her flight was not going anywhere soon, she added, “Now that I know no one’s getting home, I’m like, ‘Well, I might as well stand in line.’”
Sean Duffy said at a Friday night press briefing that the recovery would be slow, even after communications between air traffic control facilities had been restored. “It depends on, do we have crews available? Do we have pilots and flight attendants available to fly your flight? We’re going to try to move as many of those as we can tonight,” he said. That gap between restored communications and restored schedules is what left passengers at Austin waiting, even after the immediate crisis had eased.
The delay also stranded the Texas Longhorns football team. The team had already boarded a flight for a Saturday at 6:30 p.m. game against the Louisiana State University Tigers in Baton Rouge, and a statement from the Southeastern Conference said schedules may be adjusted if necessary. Elsewhere, Jewoo Park and Hyeongjin Lee were trying to get back to Seoul, South Korea, after a week in the U.S., while Rebecca Bendheim, who had flown from Portland, Maine, to Chicago, said she got stuck at O’Hare International Airport. “The energy’s definitely weird in here,” she said. “People speaking on full speakerphone to beg hotels to take them. People crying. People yelling at the phone. But we did get a meal voucher.”
An FAA briefing for airlines shared with KUT News said officials believed the outage involved cascading router failures in a communications network operated by L3Harris Technologies, which said its system connects more than 4,400 FAA facilities. That explanation helped clarify how the ground stop spread so widely, but it did not change the immediate reality for travelers: airlines were still expected to spend at least the rest of the night and into Saturday morning untangling the mess.
