Disruptions to air travel in the United States continue for the third consecutive day — more than a thousand flights have been canceled
Kyiv • UNN
More than 1,600 flights were canceled and nearly 3,600 delayed in the United States due to an FAA outage. The cause was overloaded routers.
Disruptions to air travel in the United States have continued for a third day: more than 5,200 flights were affected on Sunday. At the same time, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy predicts that the situation should return to normal by Monday, although airlines are making significant efforts to restore flight schedules after the nationwide grounding of aircraft, UNN reports, citing Reuters.
According to the specialized website FlightAware, more than 1,600 flights were canceled nationwide on Sunday, while nearly 3,600 were delayed. The day before, on Saturday, airlines canceled more than 6,400 flights in the United States and delayed more than 8,000 others.
During the program "This Week" on ABC, Sean Duffy said that there were currently no signs of a cyberattack or other malicious activity, but that the true cause of the disruption remained unknown. According to the secretary, the situation would begin to "return to normal" on Sunday and should be fully stabilized by Monday. He also emphasized that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was focusing its main efforts on ensuring passenger safety.
On Sunday, 27% of JetBlue flights and 13% of American Airlines flights were canceled. Southwest, United Airlines, and Delta reported canceling between 3% and 5% of their flights.
On Friday, the FAA imposed a nationwide departure ban, causing nearly all flights to be suspended for five hours. This became the largest disruption to air travel in the United States since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks carried out by the "al-Qaeda" group.
According to officials, the disruption was caused by the installation of a new router at a remote facility by the FAA’s contractor, L3Harris. This overloaded other air traffic control centers due to an excessive flow of data, which in turn disrupted the operation of communications systems.
On Sunday, Sean Duffy explained that replacing a router at an FAA facility in El Dorado, Arkansas, caused problems with another router—one recently replaced in Amarillo, Texas. The latter began transmitting an excessive volume of data, which overloaded equipment at air traffic control centers across the country. On Sunday, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reported that the functionality of the routers in question had been disabled; similar measures were taken with regard to approximately 60 comparable devices in the air traffic control system. According to Duffy, the administration has still not determined what exactly caused the failure during maintenance—a procedure that had previously been carried out thousands of times without any problems.
The employee who installed the router was "in our view, a true American patriot and veteran, so we do not believe this was an intentional attempt to sabotage the network during the installation," Duffy said. — "However, we have not yet determined the true root cause."
The disruption that occurred on Friday is another—and the most alarming—manifestation of the strained situation in the U.S. air traffic control system. It is suffering from outdated technology, equipment and communications problems, as well as a shortage of several thousand air traffic controllers.
According to Duffy, the routers that malfunctioned were purchased back in 2001 and were already considered obsolete by 2006. Following Friday’s events, Duffy called for $50 billion to be allocated to modernize the air traffic control system (he had previously requested $30 billion). By comparison, Congress approved an allocation of $12.5 billion last year.
What Trump says
On Sunday, President Donald Trump publicly commented for the first time on the air travel problems that arose over the weekend, also calling on lawmakers to provide additional funding.
"We have already begun the work, but it must be done comprehensively, not in parts," Trump wrote on social media. — "Congress must approve it."
In January, following success in the November 3 midterm elections, control of Congress will pass from Republicans (Trump’s fellow party members) to Democrats.
Duffy’s call to allocate more funding met with a skeptical response from Representatives Rick Larsen and André Carson — leading Democratic members of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure (as well as its Subcommittee on Aviation).
In a statement on Saturday, Larsen and Carson noted that of the $12.5 billion allocated to modernize the air traffic control system, about $11 billion has yet to be spent. “Explain to Congress once again why they need more money?” Larsen and Carson asked in their statement.
On Sunday, Duffy said that the funds allocated last year were intended only for specific expenses and did not include funding for new airspace management software.