The Federal Aviation Administration said the root cause of Friday’s nationwide ground stop remains unknown, even as officials blamed the outage on a router installed by contractor L3Harris and Saturday flight cancellations surpassed 5,300. L3Harris said in its first public response that it “takes the nationwide ground stop and its impact on travelers, airlines and air traffic operations seriously.”
Nearly 6,300 additional US flights were delayed Saturday as carriers worked to reposition crews and aircraft. Earlier in the afternoon, cancellations had already wiped out nearly 23% of scheduled US departures, led by 1,527 scrubbed flights at American Airlines and 44% of JetBlue Airways’ schedule. American began giving commuting pilots confirmed seats rather than standby travel to get crews in place, and only 86 flights were canceled for Sunday as of Saturday afternoon, with the FAA projecting schedules to largely normalize by late Sunday.