FAA chief says US air travel back to normal by Sunday

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) chief Bryan Bedford announced on Sunday that US air travel was expected to return to normal as the nationwide ground stop came to an end. The outage, caused by a botched replacement of copper wire communication lines, left hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded and disrupted travel worldwide. Over 12,000 flights were canceled on Friday, with more than 6,600 flights affected on Saturday, bringing the total to more than 1,200 flights cancelled as of Sunday morning.

The four-hour ground stop was declared after maintenance work to upgrade an old copper wire to a high-speed fiber cable caused issues with communication with planes and radar feeds. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blamed either contractor error or a faulty piece of equipment for the problem, which started flooding other routers in the air traffic control system.

Lisa Beraid, a 48-year-old insurance company worker, expressed her frustration as she waited for a flight at New York's LaGuardia airport. The ground stop was only the second time such a halt had been issued in US airspace since the 9/11 attacks. FAA officials reopened the airspace at 8:15 pm Eastern Time on Friday, lifting the nationwide halt after restoring full functionality at air traffic control facilities.

The disruption raised concerns about the country's aging infrastructure, with Duffy appealing for $50 billion in funds to upgrade and modernize the air traffic control system. New York Governor Kathy Hochul called for FAA chief Bryan Bedford to resign or be fired, while US lawmakers demanded investigations into the cause of the massive disruption and the country's cyber security.