From ground stop to blame game: US flights resume as officials fight over who pays

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US air travel was expected to return to normal on Sunday after a nationwide ground stop left hundreds of thousands of passengers in limbo and disrupted ...

NEW YORK, Nov 15 — US air travel was expected to return to normal on Sunday after a nationwide ground stop left hundreds of thousands of passengers in limbo and disrupted travel worldwide.

The Trump administration blamed Friday’s ground stop – meaning no planes can take off – on a botched replacement of old copper wire communication lines.

Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) chief Bryan Bedford said that 12,000 flights were cancelled on Friday, while tracking website FlightAware showed more than 6,600 cancelled flights on Saturday.

As of Sunday morning, FlightAware had recorded more than 1,200 cancelled flights.

Speaking at a news conference in Washington, Bedford predicted a full resumption of flight schedules by “close of business on Sunday.”

During the outage, footage from airports showed gates full, with planes waiting on taxiways and passengers thronging concourses, desperate for information.

“Tired. Exhausted. Frustrated. Yeah, you know, it’s just a mess, right?” Lisa Beraid, 48, who works for an insurance company, told AFP as she waited for a flight on Saturday morning at New York’s LaGuardia airport.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the four-hour ground stop was declared after maintenance work to upgrade an old copper wire to a high-speed fibre cable had caused “issues” with communication with planes and radar feeds.

“Either through contractor error or a faulty piece of equipment… it started flooding other routers in our air traffic control system,” Duffy told reporters.

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