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Nov. 14, 2026

FAA Names L3Harris Fiber Upgrade in Ground Stop, Says Flights Should Be Back to Normal by Sunday Night

FAA Names L3Harris Fiber Upgrade in Ground Stop, Says Flights Should Be Back to Normal by Sunday Night

FAA Names L3Harris Fiber Upgrade in Ground Stop, Says Flights Should Be Back to Normal by Sunday Night

This morning we wrote up what officials said Friday night about why the whole country stopped flying. At a Saturday press conference at the Department of Transportation, they got more specific. They named the contractor, described the work that was underway, and gave a date for when airline schedules should be back to normal.

What's new Saturday

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the trouble started during what he called routine maintenance at "a very remote location." Contractor L3Harris was moving part of the FAA's old copper telecom lines over to fiber, NPR reported. Something in that work set a router flooding the rest of the air traffic control network. "We had 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds," Duffy said, according to Al Jazeera. That flood caused the intermittent radar and communication gaps controllers were seeing.

The cause is still open. "What we're working to determine was whether we had incompetence, meaning was it user error, installer error from L3Harris, or did they install a faulty router?" Duffy said. He added that "our contractor didn't meet the moment" and that people would be held accountable. L3Harris had not commented to NPR when that story ran. "Once we were able to isolate the work being done at this location, all of our systems came back online," Duffy said. Officials said they don't believe it was a cyberattack.

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said the agency sees "zero evidence of anything nefarious, and zero evidence of anything AI-related." He said a root cause analysis will be made public once it's finished.

When things get back to normal

Bedford said about 41,000 flights within, into, and out of the U.S. were scheduled for Saturday, and that he expected 4,000 to 5,000 of them to be canceled, Global News reported. "We will still have delays and cancellations today, but that will set us up for a full recovery tomorrow," he said. Airlines, he said, expect "full schedule integrity by the close of business on Sunday." He also said every passenger will be rebooked or refunded and should contact their airline directly.

For scale: FlightAware counted more than 9,000 cancellations and nearly 25,000 delays on Friday, according to NPR. By Saturday morning, Cirium data showed more than 4,000 cancellations, about 18% of departures from the U.S.

Why it matters from the flight deck

A four-hour ground stop costs a lot more than four hours of flying. When everything stops at once, airplanes and crews end up in the wrong cities. Pilots and flight attendants run into their duty limits sitting at the gate. Reserve lists get used up fast. Fixing all that one rotation at a time is why the FAA is talking about Sunday night and not Friday night.

There's also a question every pilot is asking, and reporters asked it too: why was this work going on during a busy Friday afternoon, and how did one router at one site knock out en route radar and comms across the country? NPR reported officials didn't have an answer yet beyond calling it routine maintenance. That's the part we most want to see in the root cause report. We need to know whether the network has a single weak point and whether the cutover procedures protect against it.

The money fight

Duffy used the briefing to push again for funding. He wants $50 billion from Congress for new hardware, software, and telecom, up from the $30 billion he has been asking for since September, Politico and The Hill reported. Politico noted Congress has been lukewarm to the $30 billion request. Bedford said about 70% of the FAA's copper communications lines have already moved to fiber using the $12.5 billion Congress approved in July 2025, NPR reported.

If you're still stuck, start with your airline's app. If your flight was canceled and you'd rather not travel, ask for a refund.

We talked about how quickly one bad day snowballs for crews in our episode Commuter Nightmares, Reserve Chaos. This weekend is a live example.

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford. Photo: FAA, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Sources (all Saturday, Nov 14, 2026; times Eastern)

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