Cancellations, delays continue at Chicago airports after nationwide ground stop
Airlines and airports are still getting back on their feet after an unprecedented nationwide ground stop that occurred on Friday.
Flyers in Chicago are still dealing with the aftermath of cancellations and delays.
"We were stuck on the tarmac for four and a half hours," said Gerard Hill.
People, like Hill, are eager to find their luggage.
"So, we don't know where our bag is at – is it going to the final destination or is it still here?" he said.
Dan Schmitz says he's not sure where his bags are either. He's been trying to get home to Milwaukee from Miami for 28 hours and got stuck in Nashville.
"I hopped onto a Greyhound and took the overnight, and we ran into a bunch of issues along the road."
Meanwhile, at Midway, William Zino is visiting Chicago with his daughter Megan on a family trip. They watched nervously as a nationwide ground stop put in doubt the status of their return trip to Florida that was set for 7 a.m. Saturday.
"When we woke up, it was like 3 a.m. We got the notice that everything was canceled. We rebooked for 3 p.m., and then we've been here since 2 in the afternoon, and then they just canceled it five minutes ago, and they said there's nothing coming out today whatsoever," Megan said.
"What we're just hoping for is that they don't cancel us again in the morning — you just don't know," William said.
It's just one of countless stories of travelers thrown in limbo. The issue has also had a trickle-down effect on hotels and car rental companies for days now.
"I got a connecting flight here today and unfortunately that connecting flight also got canceled because they just didn't have enough crew to staff the flight," said Justin Lee from Pittsburgh.
Lee gave up on the skies and decided to hit the road back to Pittsburgh with a stranger he found in his same situation.
"I just met up with another guy and we're going to drive. If we can get a rent-a-car."
After the ground stop was issued for nearly five hours on Friday, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says the fault lies with a contractor, L3 Harris, in a remote location. That's where he says they were working on telecommunication lines — modernizing them from copper wire to fiber.
"The work happening was due to the age of the copper wire that we were replacing. It was such an old wire that it was being discontinued," Duffy said.
He says somehow air traffic control routers were flooded with connections, and airplanes had radar feed disrupted.
Federal Aviation Administration Administrator Bryan Bedford said that, over the course of 45 minutes, the cause of the instability was undetermined, at which point around 3:45 p.m. Friday prompted the ground stop.
"I do think the worst is behind us, but we still do have a significant amount of recovery work to do with our airline stakeholder group," he said.
"Was it incompetence? Meaning, was it user error or faulty from L3 Harris? Or did they install a faulty router?" Duffy said.
While the administration investigates what happened, others like Hill and Schmitz say their experience was scarring enough.
"I would like to sit not on a bus seat and maybe not a plane for quite a while," Schmitz said.
"From last night, I don't think I even want to get on a plane after this," Hill said.
Secretary Duffy says it was not a cyberattack and it had nothing to do with the Microsoft outage from earlier this week. He says they expect air travel to be back to normal Sunday, with no delays or issues for holiday travel with Thanksgiving in a couple of weeks.
The FAA says 70% of the communications system has been upgraded from copper to fiber.
"We haven't heard the end of this. I mean, really, we know technically what caused a problem, but we don't know is why there wasn't sufficient operational backup contingency planning for this," said DePaul University transportation expert Joe Schwieterman.
Schwieterman says more answers need to be uncovered before moving forward, including with transportation secretary duffy's demands for $50 billion to update FAA infrastructure.
"It's premature now to accelerate the discussion about billions and billions of dollars of funding until we have some assurances that common sense tradeoffs are being made. So, we don't have a national outage like this that has been devastating."
FAA officials say they expect schedules and operations to return to normal by the end of Sunday.
According to FlightAware, as of 11:30 a.m., there were 57 cancellations and 149 delays at O'Hare, and 16 cancellations and 57 delays at Midway.
The FAA and the Department of Transportation are scheduled to brief Congress on Monday about Friday's nationwide ground stop.
