Flight disruptions persisted Sunday, two days after the Federal Aviation Administration blocked departures nationwide for more than four hours as airlines scrambled to get travelers and crews on board.
“We slept here,” said Beth Martin, who was trying to return home to Birmingham, Alabama, from New York’s LaGuardia Airport on Sunday at the end of her daughter’s birthday trip. They were booked for Saturday evening, and when the delay announcements started coming in from Delta Airlinesthey decided to put the extra time to good use: strolling through Central Park and window shopping on Fifth Avenue.
But when the flight was canceled, the waitlist on a relief flight looked grim, and their original downtown hotel was charging $700 for an extra night. They both slept at LaGuardia on Saturday. She said they found wheelchairs for sleeping outside of security.
More than 1,600 U.S. flights there were canceled as of 7 a.m. ET and nearly 1,400 were delayed, according to FlightAware data. That’s far fewer than the roughly 6,700 cancellations on Saturday and the more than 9,200 on Sunday, when the FAA halted all departures to U.S. airports.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on Saturday linked the problem to a router and worked to move from copper wires to a fiber optic system. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said the upgrades were part of “routine” maintenance for moving to fiber optics.
Airlines waived change fees and fare differences and offered pilots and flight attendants extra pay to reduce delays.
Customers told CNBC they were booked on multiple flights before boarding.
Justine Fritz, who works in sales for a consumer goods company, was in New York on Friday for a business event. She tried five different flights before catching a flight to Houston, four hours before returning to Minneapolis after her Saturday flight was canceled. Fritz said she had so many boarding passes that TSA wouldn’t let her through security at first.
“It was bananas,” she told CNBC at the door. Fritz said she took the opportunity to go shopping and get a haircut, but she’s still disappointed.
“I’m missing the first hour of the Vikings game,” she said.
Martin said his journey home with his daughter would take even longer. Delta has them booked in Memphis and her husband will drive the four hours from Birmingham to pick them up.
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