Travel Hell Continues: 1000s Still Stranded After Ground Stop As Duffy Demands $50 Billion: 'This Is An Emergency'

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Travel Hell Continues: 1000s Still Stranded After Ground Stop As Duffy Demands $50 Billion: 'This Is An Emergency' More than 3,000 flights within, into or out of the US had been…

More than 3,000 flights within, into or out of the US had been canceled by Saturday morning, according to FlightAware, as airlines dug out from Friday's nationwide ground stop, which wiped out more than 9,100 flights that day and left tens of thousands of passengers stuck in airports overnight.

As we reported Friday night, the FAA lifted the stop at about 8:15 p.m. ET, roughly four hours after it halted every departure in the country. It was only the second nationwide ground stop since the September 11 attacks; the first came in January 2023, when the FAA's pilot-alert system failed.

"It's going to be slow," Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told reporters at the White House Friday night, warning that airlines would need time to get back to normal capacity and that some passengers would have to be rebooked.

Duffy said the trouble began at 3:36 p.m., when the FAA saw "instability for our radar and our communications" at centers across the country, according to the transcript of the briefing. "Our switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data and they went down," he said, adding that the FAA's new IP switches stayed up: "it's the old hardware that went down." Elsewhere in the briefing he said, "We use 1980s little copper lines."

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin offered a less flattering version for the modernization effort itself: the new equipment the FAA has been bolting onto the network "was overwhelming the older system." Piecing the upgrade together, he said, is the problem: "nickel and diming it together does not work."

On Thursday, a day before the outage, Duffy and budget director Russ Vought sent appropriators a letter asking for $30.1 billion, Roll Call reported, a request that mirrors the Modern Skies Act Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) introduced in September; only $10.1 billion of that bill goes to air traffic control upgrades.

By Friday night the ask was $50 billion. "This is an emergency -- I want Congress to give us emergency funding,"…

Cong…

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