Over 16,000 flights cancelled on Friday and today in the US, it provides FAA

A suspension of take-offs for several hours on Friday in the United States may lead to the cancellation of a total of 16,000 flights, today estimated the regulator, predicting that the operation will be regulated by the end of Sunday.

“We were unable to reschedule 12,000 flights” on Friday, including about 9,000 commercial flights and 3,000 private flights, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in a press conference.

Bryan Bedford estimated that four thousand to five thousand of the 41,000 flights scheduled for today are also “probably cancelled”.

The administrator of the FAA also expressed his conviction that air traffic in the USA should be fully recovered from the longest national shutdown in 25 years by the end of Sunday.

Paralyzing throughout the country was the first since January 2023, when a fundamental FAA computer system that sends notifications to pilots has failed, and the second since the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The US Transport Secretary today confirmed that the total suspension of take-offs, ordered the day before, was not caused by a cyber attack, but by failures in an air traffic control system that he considered obsolete.

“We do not believe in any way that it was a cyber attack. It was a problem in the FAA system,” Sean Duffy said at the press conference, saying that a hired company was working on replacing the network with fiber optics and that this procedure may have caused the system to overload.

“ We're trying to determine whether there was incompetence, i.e. whether it was human error or L3Harris installation failure, or if they installed a faulty router. We haven’t determined what the problem was,” Duffy added.

He also reiterated the request for more funds from Congress to modernise the air traffic control system and ensured that President Donald Trump is willing to work with the Democrats, who will take control of Congress in January.