Irate passengers experienced hour-long delays after a system failure forced officials to ground thousands of flights across the US – the worst airport disaster since the terror attacks of September 2001.
The Federal Aviation Administration first reported a system failure overnight on Tuesday and slowly began restoring normal air traffic operations.
Sources said a corrupted file led to the stoppage and are investigating how exactly the disruption occurred, CNN reports.
“Our preliminary work has traced the outage to a damaged database file” the FAA said.
READ ALSO; Inside Love Island’s steamest romps including pair who had sex 30 times
“At this time, there is no evidence of a cyberattack.”
Almost 5,000 delays were reported within, into, or out of the US early Wednesday, according to Flight Aware, with nearly 900 flights axed by 10am.
More than 21,000 flights were expected to take off in the US today, data from the aviation company Cirium revealed.
FAA officials initially urged airlines to pause domestic departures until 9am ET, but a spokesperson for the agency told The U.S. Sun that the ground stop has been lifted.
Aviation insiders said the outage was the worst airspace shutdown they’ve experienced since the 9/11 terror attacks.
“Periodically, there have been local issues here or there, but this is pretty significant historically,” Tim Campbell, a former senior vice president of air operations at American Airlines, told the Associated Press.
SEE ALSO; Who is Fabolous wife Emily Bustamante?
“This is unheard of, and then the action that the FAA had to take in grounding all the flights makes it even more significant,” former FAA official Michael McCormick told the Washington Post.
CONGESTED AIRPORTS
Passengers took to social media to document their ordeal of being stuck at airports across the country.
Travelers heading out of Los Angeles Airport said “full planes” had been sitting on the tarmac for hours.
Cindy Harrison saw her flight from St. Louis to Phoenix, Arizona pushed back several hours.
She was supposed to depart at around 5:40 am but is not expected to take off until just before 9am local time.
Cindy told The U.S. Sun that she thought passengers would be “grumpy” as their flights had been delayed but was left surprised by their reaction.
She added: “Some of the passengers are sleeping where they sat and the airport is getting crowded.”
Pictures showed travelers congregating in airport terminals, waiting for information from officials.
Cindy described how the airport bar was filling up, adding that there will be “some pretty good feeling” passengers.
Meanwhile, Alma Clarke was left “anxious” at the lines that had started to form near her gate.
She’s set to travel from Houston to Tokyo before making her way to Vietnam.
She told The U.S. Sun: “Half the people seem resigned to waiting and have found comfortable spots in chairs and on floors.
“The other half are making calls, rescheduling or canceling.”
She claimed that the attendant “repeated the same info” to all passengers and couldn’t provide updates amid the chaos.
Travelers across America faced hours-long delays amid the outage.
US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said he had directed an “after-action process” to determine the “root causes” of the NOTAM system outage.
SEE ALSO; Everything to know about missing 39-year-old Ana Walshe’s husband, Brian
“FAA has determined that the safety system affected by the overnight outage is fully restored, and the nationwide ground stop will be lifted effective immediately,” Buttigieg tweeted.
“I have directed an after-action process to determine root causes and recommend next steps.”
President Joe Biden has called for a full investigation into the FAA system outage.
FRUSTRATED TRAVELERS
Several early morning flights from New York’s JFK to Charlotte, LA, San Francisco, Fort Lauderdale, and Phoenix, Arizona, were all temporarily grounded, according to the airport.
All flights departing and landing at Austin’s Bergstrom airport were delayed, according to KXAN.
Several airports, including Tampa, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Honolulu, Jacksonville, and Boston, saw operations affected earlier this morning.
The temporary outage affected international flights.
One traveler at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport tweeted earlier on Wednesday that no flights were heading to America.
One passenger tweeted that their United Airlines pilot explained the outage meant that he could not check his flight plans.
The chaos comes weeks after millions of Americans saw their travel plans upended during the holidays.
Thousands of Southwest Airlines flights were axed, leaving travelers stranded.
The delays and cancelations came as millions on the East Coast were pummeled by a bomb cyclone that brought polar temperatures and dozens of inches of snow.
Stats from The Bureau of Transportation revealed that there were more than one million delayed flights last year.
More than 28 percent of flights leaving Orlando airport were delayed – the most out of any airport in the country.
Newark, Fort Lauderdale, Tampa, and Miami rounded up the worst airports for travel.
READ ALSO; Horror moment plane’s door springs open mid-air leaving passengers terrified
Read all the Latest News, Entertainment News and gossips here. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Telegram.
