U.S. air travel was recovering smoothly Sunday after a nationwide ground stop, though some passengers were weary and wary after repeated flight delays and cancellations.
Just over 1,300 of the more than 26,000 flights scheduled for Sunday were canceled, according to Cirium, an aviation analytics firm. That amounts to about 5.2% of scheduled flights. Before Friday’s ground stop, the average cancellation rate for U.S. departures was 3.4%.
The four-hour stoppage was the longest in 25 years. It caused massive travel disruptions, but officials said they expected airline schedules to fully recover by late Sunday or early Monday.
“As we look to the end of the day and into tomorrow, we should be running at full capacity,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Sunday. “We’re well on our way.”
At Nashville International Airport, Lona Ivers, Will Ahern and their children were trying to get home to Minnesota after vacationing in Tennessee. They made it from Knoxville to Nashville with no problems Saturday, only to have their flight to Minnesota canceled.
“We thought we were safe, but we weren’t,” Ivers said.
Instead, they spent the night in a hotel and were rebooked on a flight not scheduled to leave Nashville until late Sunday night.
“I already hate flying, so this just makes me hate it more,” said 14-year-old Bella Ahern. “Everything about this sucks. I already hated airports, and now I’m stuck here.”
Here’s what to know:
Flights resume, but disruption continues
In New Jersey, Ashley Lynn Qua said she arrived at Newark Liberty International Airport three hours early for her Sunday flight with all her essentials in her carry-on and armed with “an extra ounce of kindness.”
“I’m not blaming anybody like the pilots, the flight attendants, the guy who’s serving me my third coffee of the morning. Those are not the people I’m upset with,” she said. “As I interact with everybody at the airport today, I know it’s not their fault.”
Qua, 32, a clean energy researcher, was on her way to a conference in Las Vegas. Although her flight was expected to be on time, some of her colleagues were dealing with delays and cancellations.
Pete Alfieris, 60, was hoping to return home to Florida after attending a wedding in New York.
“Our flight has been delayed an hour or so so far, so fingers crossed that we can get out of here and go back to sun in Florida,” he said. “It’s just too cold up here.”
Alfieris, a facilities manager, said the entire travel system should be revamped.
“Honestly, it’s very perplexing,” he said. “We are in 2026, 2027. You know, we should have better infrastructure.”
2 potential problem sites
The Federal Aviation Administration on Sunday described a radar site in Amarillo, Texas, and a radio communications site in El Dorado, Ark., as potential sources of the problem, which involved excess data flooding the air traffic control system and causing intermittent disruptions to communications and radar feeds.
Duffy said that after a contractor replaced old copper wire with new fiber wire at the Arkansas site and the router was turned on, a problem then cropped up in Texas, cascading into the ground stop.
“We didn’t think that should or would happen,” he told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.
In multiple appearances on Sunday news shows, Duffy continued to press Congress for billions of dollars for upgrades to the air traffic control infrastructure.
“I can’t apologize for what was passed on to us. And I can’t blame Republicans or Democrats, because it’s all of them. It goes back 20, 25, 30 years of a lack of investment,” he told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The air traffic control modernization began last year after Congress approved $12.5 billion of funding. Duffy and the White House are pushing for $30 billion more to complete the work. About 70% of copper wire has been switched to fiber already, officials said Saturday.
Microsoft outage unrelated to stoppage
Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin said there was no indication the failure was related to a cyberattack and no lives were at risk.
Microsoft said Saturday that services were fully restored after its own massive outage last week. There was no indication the FAA ground stop was related to the service disruption that took Microsoft services offline Thursday, according to federal officials and a company spokesperson.
More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, Microsoft said on its website. Users reported Microsoft 365 services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were interrupted.