Unlock Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, editor-in-chief of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
American travelers face a weekend of disruption after a five-hour shutdown caused by the country’s cracking air traffic control system threw global aviation into disarray.
Thousands of flights to and across the United States will be delayed or canceled over the weekend, analysts warned, after planes were grounded Friday by the country’s aviation regulator.
Flights resumed late Friday evening after the Federal Aviation Administration lifted a nationwide ground shutdown instruction that prevented nearly all takeoffs during the high evening travel window. At least 8,000 U.S. flights have been canceled, more than a third of the planned number.
Some 22,000 flights are expected to depart from the United States on Saturday, carrying about 3 million domestic and foreign passengers. More than 3,000 of them have been canceled, according to data group Cirium, and that number is expected to rise throughout the day.
More than half of Saturday’s first wave of flights between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. Eastern Time from New York’s JFK, Newark, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta and Miami airports were canceled or heavily delayed, according to live data from Flightradar24.
“This is going to have a huge impact given that the United States has a giant domestic market that was knocked out for several hours,” said John Strickland, an aviation consultant.
American Airlines said Friday it would be “all hands on deck” to clear the delay.
Friday’s outage, only the second in the country since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, was caused by “instability” in analog systems, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said. It was seeking $30 billion to make much-needed updates to the system, but on Friday increased that figure to $50 billion.
Hours after the ground shutdown order, political tensions rose over the exact cause of the outage. U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that “new equipment and new technologies…are overwhelming the old system.”
Mullin said there had been “no cyberattack,” although he could not definitively rule it out. There is also no connection to Friday’s Microsoft service outage, he added.
Thousands of passengers had to wait for hours on planes at US airports as the tarmac filled with planes that had landed while the new services could not take off, according to plane tracking data from Flightradar24.
Chicago’s O’Hare Airport closed one of its runways in order to park planes that had landed. Passengers on a flight from Las Vegas were stranded for more than five hours before they could disembark.
About 60 flights – all bound for coastal airports in Europe or Asia – were allowed to take off during the stopover.
The impact on European and Asian services to the United States will largely depend on how many planes and crews ended up in the wrong place on Friday. British Airways and Air France said their services to the United States would operate as planned.
About 260 international flights to the United States were canceled on Saturday, or 12 percent of those scheduled, Cirium reported. Most came from Mexico or Canada.
Friday’s shutdown came “at a time when the key wave of European arrivals was heading into the country,” so they landed safely and will be available to operate flights back to Europe on Saturday, Strickland said.
Tim Johnson, chief of staff of the United Kingdom’s Civil Aviation Authority, said anyone traveling to the United States this weekend should “check with their airline for the latest information before going to the airport.”
Domestic flights across the United States are expected to be significantly disrupted for several days. A breakdown in the UK’s air traffic control system in September led to three days of disruption for some passengers, while baggage systems took longer to recover.
Gn headline
