More Than 2,500 US Flights Canceled as Airlines Dig Out From Longest Nationwide Ground Stop in 25 Years

More than 2,500 flights were canceled across the United States on Saturday and hundreds more were delayed, according to the tracking website FlightAware, as airlines worked to recover from the longest nationwide ground stop in 25 years.

Trump administration officials said new technology being added to the nation's air traffic control system overloaded antiquated equipment, producing what they described as intermittent communications and radar gaps and prompting a shutdown that lasted more than four hours on Friday. A limited number of domestic flights departed after the stop was lifted around 8:15 p.m. ET. Officials said the effects could be felt for days, though they expect the system to be operating normally in time to handle the Thanksgiving travel rush.

The nationwide stop was the first since January 2023, when another key FAA computer system that sends notices to pilots malfunctioned, and the second since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Among the stranded travelers was Emily Brown, who waited more than four hours Friday at the Dallas airport with her 14-year-old daughter for a flight to Columbus, Ohio, before giving up. They had planned to surprise her daughter's best friend, and the daughter instead phoned the friend through tears from 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."

Other passengers faced long waits of their own. Ruth Coles was stuck on her plane for more than five hours after landing at Los Angeles International Airport from Newark, New Jersey, and said travelers were told they were waiting for a gate to open. Corbyn Wascher, a 37-year-old high school teacher, spent four hours on the tarmac at Charlotte Douglas International Airport on Friday while heading home to Moline, Illinois, from a conference in Miami. Unable to find a new flight, he took a $100 Uber to a hotel 25 minutes from the airport and was rebooked on a Saturday afternoon flight to Chicago O'Hare International Airport. At airports across the country, passengers stared at screens showing delays, rushed to find buses or trains, and in some cases passed the time by breaking out in song.

The stoppage also scrambled weekend plans for professional and college sports teams, which adjusted game start times, searched for hotel rooms, rescheduled flights and chartered buses. Auburn University's football team opted to take a bus to Mississippi State, and the Saturday start time was pushed from noon ET to 4:15 p.m. Baylor, Washington, Kansas State, Minnesota and No. 19 Ole Miss were also affected, with Ole Miss not planning to fly until Saturday morning for its game against Oklahoma. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy encouraged NCAA football teams to reach out to the FAA so the agency can prioritize flights for Saturday games.

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 were safely landed Friday. Duffy blamed Congress for failing to approve more funding for new technology, while downplaying that trying to implement new fixes overtaxed the system, and 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 problems were not linked to the FAA's new AI-powered system being rolled out to predict problems in the sky. "This is all the old legacy equipment. All of the new equipment that's been deployed did not go down," he said. The FAA has already replaced thousands of old copper wires with fiber optic lines and upgraded hundreds of radio systems under an overhaul that began last year after Congress approved $12.5 billion in funding, and Duffy and the White House are pushing for $30 billion more to complete the work.

The problem appeared similar to a regional air traffic control communications outage in September that snarled hundreds of flights across the Northeast, although that disruption was linked to a construction crew cutting a fiber optic line. Aviation safety expert Steve Arroyo, a former United Airlines pilot, said the difference this time was the nationwide scale, which left controllers unable to reliably talk to pilots. "You've got to stop airplanes on the ground and not put them in the air, where you're going to risk not being able to communicate with them," he said, adding that unlike after 9/11, planes were not ordered to land immediately and pilots likely could still communicate with airport ground controllers.