Bryan Bedford, the administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, said at a press conference on Saturday afternoon that the nationwide ground stop since Friday afternoon was “for the right reasons.” Apologising for the inconvenience travellers faced, Bedford simultaneously ruled out foul play behind the unprecedented outage.
“We see zero evidence of anything nefarious and zero evidence of anything AI-related,” Bedford said, adding that passengers whose travel was disrupted by the outage will get a full refund.
Bedford said that the agency’s systems remain stable, though there are delays and cancellations that have spilled on to Saturday, as well. He said that between 4,000 and 5,000 scheduled flights on Saturday will likely be cancelled even as operations return to normal. Over 10,000 flights were delayed or cancelled on Friday.
“As we went into Friday, we had 50,000 flights scheduled to operate,” Bedford said. “When we went into the ground stop at approximately 3:45 p.m. East Coast time yesterday, we had completed about 30,000 of those flights, either on the ground or in the air.
“So, we had 20,000 more flights to complete over the course of the four-hour ground stop. We were ultimately able to recover about 8,000 of those 20,000 flights. 12,000 we were unable to recover.”
Explaining the impact of the ground stop on the flights affected, Bedford said that the flights and crew members need to readjust their schedule to get back to functioning normally, a process that will take most of Saturday to readjust. A complete restoration of the flight schedule would take place by Sunday, Bedford said.
“Those crews, pilots and flight attendants need to get to their points of reconnection with their schedules,” Bedford continued. “Our airline partners are working through that. We do anticipate somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 of the 41,000 flights that are scheduled today likely will cancel.”
Bryan Bedford facing questions over the handling of agency
In the aftermath of the unprecedented ground stop, which happened for a little less than two hours in 2023, Bryan Bedford’s handling of the FAA has come under scrutiny.
According to a report by the Washington Examiner, ATC controllers are complaining about Bedford’s approach to managing the agency, which they described as “backwards.” Journalist Anna Giaritelli, who was behind the story, reported that the complaints were about how Bedford was treating the agency as “a corporate balance sheet by trying to squeeze out every ounce of productivity from controllers.”
One ATC controller who recently left the ATC’s New York Centre in August said that the morale in the agency was an “all-time low” due to the culture under Bedford. One of the main complaints that came up was increased shift hours of ATC controllers, which critics cited in the report claimed endangered public safety.