November 15, 2026
Air travel disruptions in the United States enter their third day, Sunday, with impacts exceeding more than 5,200 flights, at a time when airlines are racing against time to return their flight schedules to normal following a comprehensive nationwide halt to shipping traffic.
The “Flight Aware” website, which specializes in aviation data, explained that domestic air traffic on Sunday witnessed the cancellation of more than 1,600 flights and the delay of about 3,600 others, an extension of the greater paralysis witnessed on Saturday, which resulted in the cancellation of more than 6,400 flights and the delay of more than eight thousand.
In the same context, Transport Minister Sean Duffy confirmed, during an appearance on the “This Week” program on ABC, that there was no evidence of a cyber attack or malicious intent behind the crisis, although the direct causes remained unclear. Duffy expected that flights would return to normal during the day, Sunday, and to fully normal by Monday, stressing the priority of passenger safety for the Federal Aviation Administration.
The roots of the crisis go back to last Friday, when the Federal Aviation Administration issued a comprehensive flight suspension order that led to the suspension of most departing flights for about five hours, in the longest suspension of its kind in American air traffic since the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Officials said that the crisis began when LL3 Harris, the company contracting with the administration, installed a new router in a remote facility, which led to a massive influx of data that burdened air traffic control centers and hindered communications systems. Minister Duffy explained that replacing a router at a department facility in El Dorado, Arkansas, caused problems for another router that was recently replaced in Amarillo, Texas, and the latter began sending intense data that overwhelmed routers in monitoring centers across the country.
The Federal Aviation Administration announced on Sunday that it had disabled “original router functionality” and implemented the same procedure on about 60 similar routers in the system. However, Duffy acknowledged that the administration had not yet determined the root cause of the problem, pointing out that similar maintenance work had been conducted thousands of times before with no previous records of the problems, and stressing that the technician who installed the device was a good American citizen and a veteran, which ruled out the hypothesis of intentional sabotage.
These disruptions highlight the extent of the structural pressures facing the air traffic control system in the United States, which is burdened by outdated technology and equipment, in addition to a severe shortage estimated at thousands in the number of air traffic controllers.
On the political level, US President Donald Trump made his first public statements regarding the crisis, calling on lawmakers to allocate additional funding to modernize infrastructure. Trump wrote on social media platforms: “We have already begun the work, but it must be done all at once, not in separate stages. Congress must approve.”
It is noteworthy that the Democrats are preparing to control Congress instead of the Republicans, Trump’s allies, next January, following their gains in the midterm elections that took place on November 3.
