US Transport chief says unclear if 'incompetence' or bad tech to blame for groundings

US Federal Aviation Administration officials and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on Saturday said that investigations are ongoing in an attempt to find the cause of the largest mass grounding of flights in the country in over 25 years.

As stranded passengers scrambled to find hotel rooms or buses and trains that could take them to their destinations, others hunkered down in the nation's airports in the first such nationwide grounding since January 2023 and the largest since the September 11, 2001, terror attacks.

International carriers were also forced to cancel flights to the US, and the massive backlog prompted, among other things, the rescheduling of dozens of college and professional sporting events — a staple of many Americans' weekends.

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said that a total of 16,000 flights had been delayed on Friday and Saturday, adding that he hoped flight schedules would be back to normal sometime Sunday, saying the "worst is behind us."

Addressing the situation in press conferences on Friday and Saturday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, a former reality TV personality, said no evidence of malfeasance had been found, before pointing his finger at numerous possible culprits, starting with the previous administration, then Congress and eventually settling on possible "contractor incompetence."

Duffy said the issue may have been a faulty router installed when workers from "legacy contractor" L3Harris replaced aged copper wire with new fiberoptic cable or that they had somehow caused a system overload while updating the wires.

On Saturday, during a press conference that was itself plagued with technical problems, Duffy said, "We're working to determine whether we had incompetence, meaning, was it user error or installer error from L3Harris, or did they install a faulty router? We haven't determined what the fault was," Duffy said, adding that either way, "Our contractor didn't meet the moment."

He was also asked why such complicated updates would be undertaken on a Friday afternoon when air travel is at its busiest rather than on a Saturday night, for instance, when far-fewer planes are in the air. He replied by saying the scheduling of such updates will be reevaluated moving forward.

On Friday Duffy said, "We didn't think we would have this kind of outage. We did."

Since the decision was made to update the very old infrastructure currently in use, Congress has approved $12.5 billion (€11.3 billion) to fund the changeover. The Trump administration had been seeking a further $30 billion to complete the job but Duffy on Friday called $50 billion instead, saying, "This is an emergency."

Despite the pain and frustration endured by customers, there is also a massive financial component to the groundings.

Since the groundings were ordered by the FAA, airlines are not legally responsible for compensating passengers whose flights were cancelled.

On Saturday, Administrator Bedford said the FAA is "working with aviation stakeholders" to make things right, saying, "everyone will either be reaccommodated (sic) on a flight or they'll get a full refund."

Investors are already beginning to calculate potential losses to airlines — which will compound the sting of sky-high fuel prices brought on by the Trump administration's war in Iran and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz — with shares of American, Delta and United Airlines falling between 1% and 2% late Friday.

Shares in JetBlue as well as contractor L3Harris were down 3%.