US air travel chaos drags on as Duffy pushes back normal return
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says planes and crews are out of position after Friday's ground stop, and full service probably waits until Monday.
US airlines are still cancelling flights two days after a nationwide no-takeoff order, and the Trump administration said on Sunday that full normal service will probably not arrive until Monday.
As of Sunday morning, 1,460 flights within, into or out of the United States had been cancelled, according to the flight tracking site FlightAware.
The Federal Aviation Administration issued the ground stop on Friday after what officials describe as botched work replacing old copper communication cables used by air traffic control. It was only the second such nationwide order since the September 11, 2001 attacks, in airspace that handles some of the world's busiest traffic.
The head of the FAA, Bryan Bedford, said on Saturday that travel would be back to normal by the close of business on Sunday. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy revised that timetable. "In the airspace, we're going to see things come back to normal today, but probably fully normal tomorrow," Duffy told ABC News. "We had airplanes and crews out of position because of Friday, so it takes a little bit of time to do that."
President Donald Trump, who had not spoken publicly about the shutdown for days, blamed his predecessor. "The Biden Administration was an FAA disaster," he said, adding that "everything they touched turned bad". He said Congress, which his Republicans have controlled for two years, must approve money to modernise the system.
Duffy has asked for $50 billion to upgrade air traffic control and urged Congress to "meet this moment". He told CNN that the equipment he inherited includes radar dating from the 1960s, and rejected calls for his resignation. "So when we do work and things go wrong, of course I'm the secretary. But I also have to acknowledge what was delivered to me," he said.
Democrats said the Republican-controlled Congress could already have funded the upgrade.
The order halted departures across the country and stranded passengers at airports, and it has focused attention on how old the infrastructure behind US aviation has become.
How the reports differ
CNA and Bangkok Post carried the fullest accounts and both led with the administration's warning that the disruption would run another day, quoting Duffy from separate ABC News and CNN interviews and giving the 1,460 cancellation figure from FlightAware. Arab News led instead with Trump's criticism of Joe Biden, framing the story around the president's first public comment on the shutdown and leaving out the flight numbers. Winnipeg Sun published the same headline as the others with no further reporting attached to it.
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