'Full recovery' expected by Sunday as thousands of flights impacted after historic ground stop

Thousands of flights were canceled across the country Saturday as airports and airlines worked to get back on track following Friday’s nationwide ground stop, which lasted more than four hours — the longest such shutdown of U.S. airspace since 9/11. At a news conference Saturday morning, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blamed the outage on "routine maintenance" at a "remote FAA location," where a contractor identified as L3Harris was replacing older copper wiring with fiber-optic lines. "We will still have delays and cancellations today, but that will set us up for full recovery tomorrow," FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said.