Air travel across the country was beginning to recover Saturday morning after the Federal Aviation Administration issued a nationwide ground stop of all flights Friday evening, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said.
“Here’s the latest: Operations are slowly returning to normal this morning,” Duffy wrote in a post on X. “Planes are pushing back, taxiing, and taking off, and it is safe to fly. We are in close coordination with the airlines to support the ongoing recovery.”
Duffy said travelers should still expect disruptions. “The top priority right now is making sure travelers get home safely to their families,” he wrote, while thanking “our air traffic controllers, pilots, and flight crews who are working around the clock.”
The ground stop came after what Duffy described as a failure in the FAA’s telecommunications infrastructure. At a press conference held with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin hours after the stoppage began, Duffy explained the technical cause.
“We have TDM telecom. So, this is analog telecom,” Duffy said. “Our switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data, and they went down. I shouldn’t say they went down. They started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers, and because of that we shut the system down.”
Duffy used the press conference to renew calls for funding to overhaul the nation’s air traffic control system. He and President Donald Trump had previously requested $30 billion for the upgrade; Duffy said he is now asking for $50 billion.
The disruption affected roughly 1.5 million passengers, according to CNBC. Flight-data firm Cirium reported that 11,000 flights were scheduled to depart U.S. airports after 4 p.m. ET on Friday, and about 600 flights were diverted that day, with 104 of those rerouted to other airports.
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