New York (AFP) – Weary travelers braced for more flight disruptions Saturday as service resumed at US airports after an hours-long stoppage that the Trump administration blamed on a botched replacement of old copper wire communication lines.
Friday’s nationwide ground stop – meaning no planes can take off – sparked widespread chaos and left hundreds of thousands of passengers in limbo, with some pulled off planes moments before they were due to depart by airline staff who appeared in the dark about unfolding events.
“Tired. Exhausted. Frustrated. Yeah, you know, it’s just a mess, right?” Lisa Beraid, 48, who works for an insurance company, told AFP as she waited for a flight Saturday morning at New York’s La Guardia airport.
Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) chief Bryan Bedford said that 12,000 flights were canceled on Friday and between four and five thousand flights out of 41,000 scheduled for Saturday were likely to be canceled as well.
By early afternoon, tracking website FlightAware had recorded at least 5,000 canceled flights for Saturday.
Speaking at a news conference in Washington, Bedford offered a “sincere apology to the American traveling public.”
He predicted a full resumption of flight schedules by “close of business on Sunday.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Friday’s four-hour ground stop was declared after maintenance work to upgrade an old copper wire to a high-speed fiber cable had caused “issues” with communication with airplanes and radar feeds.
“Either through contractor error or a faulty piece of equipment…it started flooding other routers in our air traffic control system,” Duffy told reporters.
In another embarrassment, Saturday’s news conference – where administration officials also appealed for more funds to upgrade outdated systems – was delayed due to technical problems with the audio feed.
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And the lie detector test said….
Anyone who has paid attention for the past decade knows we can now rule out “repair of old copper wiring” as a potential cause.
ok so the latest is now a repair of old wiring. I kinda feel if that was it they should have known pretty quickly that was it rather than saying the old system could not handle things and saying right away that it definately was not the upgrades they started the day before.
Trump’s administration has no idea about IT. Even if they were trying to be honest, they’re probably relaying it wrong regardless
That sounds like a broadcast storm, but that should be a localized event it seems insane that something like that could bring down the FAA coast to coast.
