U.S. authorities say airline traffic should be back to normal by Sunday after a rare nationwide shutdown that forced thousands of flights to be canceled and left planes and crews scattered across the system. The Federal Aviation Administration lifted the ground-stop order late Friday after restoring full air traffic control function.
The scale was severe. Bryan Bedford said 12,000 flights were canceled on Friday, and FlightAware recorded more than 6,600 more cancellations on Saturday. By Sunday morning, the tally still showed more than 1,200 canceled flights, even as Bedford said schedules should recover fully by the close of the day.
For travelers like Lisa Beraid, who was waiting for a flight Saturday at LaGuardia in Nueva York, the disruption was not an abstract systems failure but a ruined travel day. “La verdad es que esto es un desastre,” she said. Around her, the visible problem was only the end result of a technical breakdown that had already cascaded through the network: once trips are delayed and aircraft are out of place, airlines must rebuild operations piece by piece by moving crews, reassigning planes and reopening routes in the order the system can support.
Authorities said the outage began when work to replace old copper lines with fiber optic cable caused communication problems with aircraft and radar signals. The government of Donald Trump ruled out a cyberattack, but lawmakers on Saturday called for an investigation into why the disruption was so large and whether the country is protected well enough against cybercrime. Sean Duffy called the nationwide halt to departures an extremely rare event and said there had been similar action only after 11 de septiembre de 2001, with a smaller version in 2023 after a computer failure.
The tension now is not whether the system can restart; it already has. The harder question is whether a modernized network can keep from breaking in such a basic way while the Casa Blanca is pressing for more money to upgrade air traffic control and while Duffy has been warning for some time about the poor state of the system. For passengers, the next checkpoint is simpler: whether the airline schedules that were shattered over two days can be put back together by Sunday night without another round of cancellations.
