Airport nightmares continue as FAA struggles to pinpoint blame for historic meltdown

The U.S. Department of Transportation was working Saturday to determine whether Friday's air traffic control system meltdown resulted from human error or equipment failure as travelers across the nation continued to grapple with a cascade of flight delays and cancellations.

Official response and confirmed impact

The new equipment began flooding other routers in the air traffic control system — sending more than 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds — causing radar and communications disruptions, he said.

It is currently unclear whether the contractor, L3 Harris, or the piece of new equipment itself was at fault.

"A contractor didn't meet the moment or the equipment didn’t meet the moment — and it caused the outages.” L3 Harris could not be immediately reached for comment.

On Saturday morning, thousands of planes were back in American airspace, but airlines warned it would take several days to recover and urged passengers to change their flights to later dates where possible.

Incident under investigation

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the crisis began when a contractor was performing routine maintenance at a remote FAA location to switch telecommunication lines from 1980s-era copper wire to a fiber line.

As a safety measure, the FAA decided to ground all planes for more than four hours.

“This was an FAA system that didn't meet the moment," said Duffy.