US air travel disruptions continued for a third day with more than 5,200 flights already affected, but Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy predicted a return to normalcy by today even as airlines scrambled to get back on schedule following a system-wide ground stop.
More than 1,600 flights nationwide were cancelled and almost 3,600 were delayed yesterday, according to aviation data site FlightAware.
Airlines on Saturday had cancelled more than 6,400 US flights and delayed more than 8,000.
Duffy said on ABC’s This Week programme there is no evidence of a cyberattack or other malicious intent in the matter, but the cause remained unclear.
Duffy had said that flights would come ‘back to normal’ yesterday ‘but probably fully normal’ today, and emphasised the Federal Aviation Administration’s focus on keeping passengers safe.
Yesterday, 27 per cent of JetBlue flights and 13pc of American Airlines flights were cancelled, with Southwest, United Airlines and Delta reporting cancellations of 3pc to 5pc of their flights.
The FAA issued a nationwide ground stop on Friday that halted nearly all departing flights for almost five hours.
It was the longest nationwide halt to US air travel since the September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda attacks on the United States.
The installation by FAA contractor L3Harris of at least one new router at a remote facility led to a situation in which other air traffic control centres were overloaded with a flood of data that hampered communications systems, according to officials.
Duffy said that the replacement of a router at an FAA facility in El Dorado, Arkansas, triggered problems with a recently replaced router in Amarillo, Texas, which started broadcasting and overloading routers at other air traffic control centres across the country.
The ‘functionality of the originating routers’ has been disabled, the FAA said, adding that it did the same for about 60 similar routers in the air traffic control system.
But the FAA still does not know what ultimately caused the problem that occurred with maintenance work that had been done thousands of times before without issue, Duffy said.
The worker who installed the router was ‘a good American patriot, we believe, a veteran – so we don’t think that someone tried to sabotage the network on the install’, Duffy said. “But we don’t actually have the root cause.”
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