FAA administrator Bryan Bedford says nationwide ground stop for ‘the right reasons,' rules out foul play

详细摘要

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said the nationwide ground stop was for the right reasons, apologized for the disruption, and ruled out foul play.

Bryan Bedford, the administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, said at a press conference on Saturday afternoon that the nationwide ground stop since Friday afternoon was "for the right reasons." Apologising for the inconvenience travellers faced, Bedford simultaneously ruled out foul play behind the unprecedented outage.

"We see zero evidence of anything nefarious and zero evidence of anything AI-related," Bedford said, adding that passengers whose travel was disrupted by the outage will get a full refund.

Bedford said that the agency's systems remain stable, though there are delays and cancellations that have spilled on to Saturday, as well. He said that between 4,000 and 5,000 scheduled flights on Saturday will likely be cancelled even as operations return to normal. Over 10,000 flights were delayed or cancelled on Friday.

“As we went into Friday, we had 50,000 flights scheduled to operate," Bedford said. "When we went into the ground stop at approximately 3:45 p.m. East Coast time yesterday, we had completed about 30,000 of those flights, either on the ground or in the air.

"So, we had 20,000 more flights to complete over the course of the four-hour ground stop. We were ultimately able to recover about 8,000 of those 20,000 flights. 12,000 we were unable to recover."

Also read: FAA outage update: Sean Duffy assures passengers ‘it is safe to fly’ as US flight operations slowly returning to normal

Explaining the impact of the ground stop on the flights affected, Bedford said that the flights and crew members need to readjust their schedule to get back to functioning normally, a process that will take most of Saturday to readjust. A complete restoration of the flight schedule would take place by Sunday, Bedford said.

"Those crews, pilots and flight attendants need to get to their points of reconnection with their schedules," Bedford continued. "Our airline partners are working through that.

In the aftermath of the unprecedented ground stop, which happened for a…

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