US air travel will soon return to normal, official says

Detailed summary

Air travel in the US will soon be back to normal, a senior Trump administration official said on Sunday, after a nationwide ground stoppage rocked the country and caused headaches…

Air travel in the US will soon be back to normal, a senior Trump administration official said on Sunday, after a nationwide ground stoppage rocked the country and caused headaches for international flyers.

Airlines rushed to restore regular schedules, leaving more than 6,100 flights cancelled and another 7,400 trips delayed as of Saturday night, according to aviation data firm FlightAware.

On Sunday, more than 1,540 flights were cancelled and more than 1,330 delayed.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told ABC News that the US would "see things come back to normal today, fully normal tomorrow".

He told NBC News that he would not apologise for the ground stop, saying the problems stemmed from decades of neglect and underinvestment in the Federal Aviation Administration, predating his tenure.

"I can't apologise for what was passed on to us. And I can't blame Republicans or Democrats because it's all of them," he said. "It goes back 20, 25, 30 years of lack of investment."

FAA administrator Bryan Bedford did apologise for the disruption on Saturday.

“I do think the worst is behind us,” he said at a news conference. “But we still do have a significant amount of recovery work to do with our airline stakeholder group.”

Friday's ground stoppage was the longest in the US since the September 11, 2001 terror attacks and only the third in the country's history. It lasted for four hours, with authorities blaming a data overload for crippling air traffic control communications and radar.

Opening of the article, excerpted from The National. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.