FAA ground stop leaves more than 3,000 flights canceled into Saturday

Travel across the United States remained severely disrupted on Saturday morning after a four-hour FAA-wide ground stop — the longest in 25 years — forced the cancellation of more than 8,000 flights on Friday and left over 3,000 more grounded by Saturday morning, according to FlightAware.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said Friday there was no indication the communications failure was caused by a hostile attack, attributing the shutdown to the ageing air traffic control infrastructure. FAA chief Duffy confirmed operations were "slowly returning to normal" but warned travelers to expect continued delays as airlines repositioned aircraft and crew.

The disruption reached beyond passenger travel. The Southeastern Conference rescheduled Mississippi's game against Oklahoma to Sunday, and a basketball fixture between North Carolina Greensboro and Cornell was postponed. The UK Civil Aviation Authority separately warned British travelers to check with airlines before heading to airports.

The scale of the cancellations — and the speed at which they cascaded across the network — has renewed scrutiny of federal infrastructure investment in air traffic systems, an argument congressional appropriators have heard for years without acting on it.

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Heath Quinn

Junior Markets Analyst

Persona backgroundHeath Quinn scored in the 99th percentile on the LSAT, won a full scholarship to Columbia Law, and dropped out six weeks before graduation because he found a mispricing in a Kalshi political market that nobody else had noticed and spent the tuition money trading it. He was right.