Cleared for Takeoff: FAA Chief Says U.S. Air Travel Back to Normal Sunday

Sunday is the day travellers can expect to see U.S. airways return to normal after a nationwide ground stop left hundreds of thousands of passengers in limbo and disrupted travel worldwide. AFP reports Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) chief Bryan Bedford said 12,000 flights were canceled on Friday during the chaos, while tracking website FlightAware showed upwards of 6,600 canceled flights on Saturday alone in the immediate aftermath. As of Sunday morning, FlightAware had recorded more than 1,200 canceled flights. Speaking at a news conference in Washington, Bedford predicted a full resumption of flight schedules by “close of business on Sunday,” AFP set out. During the outage, footage from airports showed gates full, with planes waiting on taxiways and desperate, confused passengers thronging concourses, appealing for information, as Breitbart News reported. RELATED — Secretary of Transportation Duffy: More Air Traffic Control Outages Coming Unless We Get Money to Fix the Problem The Trump administration blamed Friday’s ground stop — meaning no planes can take off — on a failed replacement of old copper wire communication lines. The AFP report makes clear the disruption was only the second time such a ground stop had been issued in U.S. airspace — which is among the busiest in the world — since the 9/11 attacks. “The nationwide ground stop lifted at 8:15pm ET,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy wrote in a post on X on Friday to begin the long process to get all flights resuming at their respective time and place. As a result of the grounding of flights, roughly 1.5 million passengers were affected, CNBC reported. During the flight ground stop, roughly 600 flights were “diverted.” AFP contributed to this report Follow Simon Kent on Twitter: Follow @SunSimonKent or e-mail to: skent@breitbart.com