Washington: The nationwide ground stop that led to thousands of flight cancellations in US was the first since Jan 2023, when another key Federal Aviation Administration computer system that sends notices to pilots malfunctioned, and the second since the Sept 11, 2001, attacks.Andrew Charlton, an aviation consultant, said the stoppage on Friday had affected about a quarter of the 45,000 flights in the US each day.“The knock-on effect of that is incredible,” said Charlton, managing director of Aviation Advocacy. “The aircraft doesn’t just fly from A to B and back to B and then stop. It then moves onto C and then over to E and around and around and around. It is, of course, exacerbated if you’re talking about long-haul flights, international flights over the Atlantic or over the Pacific.”At airports across the US, passengers stared at screens showing delays or rushed to find buses or trains to their destinations. Emily Brown and her 14-year-old daughter waited more than four hours Friday at the Dallas airport for their flight to Columbus, Ohio, before giving up. They were travelling to surprise her daughter’s best friend. Instead, she had to settle for phoning the friend through tears in the airport, Brown said.“She saved up her money to buy her own ticket, and she’s planned this whole weekend,” Brown said. “Now we’re not sure when we’re gonna be able to go.”More than 2,500 flights were cancelled in the US Saturday and hundreds more were delayed, according to FlightAware, a website that tracks flight disruptions.At London’s Heathrow Airport, several flights to and from the US were listed as delayed or cancelled Saturday, including American Airlines flights to Dallas and Los Angeles, and a British Airways flight to New York’s JFK Airport. A Delta flight from Atlanta, an American flight from Miami and a United flight from Chicago were also listed as cancelled.Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin told reporters at the White House that no one was in any danger as more than 3,000 flights in the air at the time of the grounding order landed safely Friday.US transportation secretary Sean Duffy blamed Congress for failing to approve more funding for new technology, while downplaying the fact that trying to implement new fixes overtaxed the system. He suggested more disruptions might occur. “We didn’t think we would have this kind of outage. We did,” he said. “We were able to review what went wrong, and then reboot the system and go. But you will have more of these.”Duffy said the failure on Friday involved old equipment and was not linked to FAA’s new AI-powered system, which the agency is rolling out to help predict problems in the sky. ap
