Airlines work to restore flights in US as FAA probes faulty router

US FLIGHTS disruptions stretched into Sunday (Nov 15) as airlines worked to return to normal operations following the four-hour nationwide stoppage on Friday as authorities continued to investigate what caused it.

After cancelling more than 6,600 flights on Saturday, airlines scrapped nearly 1,900 on Sunday, with more than 6,300 others being delayed, as of 3 pm New York time, according to data from tracker FlightAware.

American Airlines is showing the most cancelled flights so far on Sunday, with 613, while JetBlue Airways has shed more than a quarter of its schedule.

FAA administrator Bryan Bedford said that airlines expect to return to their normal flight schedules by the end of business on Sunday, while he apologised for the disruptive shutdown. 

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the issue was traced to the replacement of outdated copper wire at a remote location near El Dorado, Arkansas, by L3Harris Technologies, and that a router there started flooding the air-traffic control system with connection attempts. 

That router is now undergoing testing at an L3Harris facility, Duffy said, adding that it was still unclear whether the issue was caused by the contractor’s “incompetence” or by a faulty router.

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“Those routers were purchased in 2001,” Duffy said on ABC’s This Week. “They were obsolete in 2006, and we still use them in 2026 just to underscore how old the network is.”

The FAA said it is also examining equipment at a site in Amarillo, Texas, that may have also contributed to the overloads. The outage, which began at 3.30 pm New York time on Friday, led to instability at 17 of the 22 Air Route Traffic Control Centres and spread to several Terminal Radar Approach Controls, the agency said. The shutdown was lifted at 8.15 pm on Friday. More than 12,000 flights in total were cancelled.

Duffy said the government has looked at the risks that come with upgrading the FAA’s systems and there was no specific suggestion that the work on Friday would lead to a breakdown.

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“It’s worked thousands of times when we made the switchover,” Duffy said on CBS’s Face the Nation. “This time it didn’t.”

Duffy focused his criticism on L3Harris.

“L3Harris decades ago got the contract to run and own the network that operates communication for the FAA,” he said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “They own the network, which is why I’m asking for billions of dollars from Congress to build a brand new architecture of a network by the best companies in the world, including AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen.”

L3Harris said in a statement on Saturday that it’s cooperating with the FAA in its investigation. The company said that, with its telco partners and the FAA, it has “completed more than 70 per cent of the planned airspace communications conversion from legacy copper wires to a fiber-optic system.” 

In the wake of the ground stop, Duffy said the Trump administration will send Congress an emergency funding request for US$50 billion to modernise the FAA’s aging infrastructure, saying the money should have been approved much earlier. 

“I can’t blame Republicans or Democrats, because it’s all of them,” he said on Meet the Press. “This goes back 20, 25, 30 years of a lack of investment.”

President Donald Trump, who was silent on the FAA stoppage until Sunday morning, backed up the push for Congress to approve a massive infusion of cash.

“Much of our current air control system is 50 years old — RIDICULOUS!” he said in a social media post. “We have already started the work, but it should be done all at once, not in drips and drabs. Congress must approve.” 

Last year, Congress provided the FAA with US$12.5 billion to carry out the modernization effort, but Duffy has said more money is needed. He initially requested an additional US$30 billion but upped that ask to US$50 billion after Friday’s breakdown. 

House Democrats, meanwhile, said that 15 months after Congress approved the US$12.5 billion for air-traffic control improvements, the Transportation Department has obligated US$4.3 billion and only spent US$1 billion.

Duffy said on ABC that Congress put strict boundaries on that spending and he needs more flexible funding to carry out the telecom upgrades. BLOOMBERG