Air chaos in the U.S.: the failure that led to the nationwide flight shutdown is revealed

WASHINGTON. — While the airlines operating at United States airports are still trying to recover from the largest nationwide air traffic shutdown in 25 years, with a ground stop of more than four hours that left thousands of passengers stranded last Friday, authorities pointed out that the failure that forced the suspension of departures occurred during routine work to upgrade an old copper communications line to fiber optic at a "remote" facility of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). "This type of work has been carried out in the United States for decades. Therefore, we are trying to determine whether there was incompetence. In other words, was it human error?" said US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy at a press conference this morning, adding that a contractor, L3Harris, may have installed "a defective router" or simply "may not have done a good job." According to the authorities, that work to upgrade a communications cable caused a router malfunction that overloaded parts of the system that allow data communication with aircraft. The drastic and sudden measure taken by the FAA on Friday — the second of its kind in the United States since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 — affected tens of thousands of passengers by halting all departures nationwide. About 4,600 flights were canceled and more than 2,300 were delayed this Saturday, out of the 41,000 flights scheduled in the United States during the day. Fully resolving the chaos caused by the suspension of operations is expected to take until at least Sunday night. Passengers at Ronald Reagan Washington National AirportTom Brenner - FR117851 AP "Operations are gradually returning to normal," Duffy said. "There will continue to be some delays and cancellations as airlines reschedule their flights and redistribute aircraft and crews to where they are most needed," he added. The operation The failure forced airlines to try to reorganize their schedules with aircraft and crews scattered and out of their usual locations, while also having to attend to hundreds of thousands of affected passengers who were left stranded in terminals across the country waiting for news of their flights. According to FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford, who appeared alongside Duffy in the morning, about 9,000 commercial flights were canceled on Friday, in addition to some 3,000 private ones. "The worst is over," he said. The official stated that there is no evidence that the outage was due to problems related to artificial intelligence (AI) or "any malicious action." He also explained that the authorities, after detecting instability in the system, ordered the halt of flights "as a matter of utmost precaution." The nationwide suspension ordered at 3:54 pm on Friday (Eastern Time) was the first since January 11, 2023, when the FAA grounded all domestic flight departures for 95 minutes to alert pilots to safety issues. By Guillermo Idiart