U.S. flights are set to run close to normal on Monday as airlines scramble to get back on track after the Federal Aviation Administration grounded departures nationwide for more than four hours on Friday.
Disruptions lingered on Sunday, but passengers were getting on their way.
More than 1,600 U.S. flights there were canceled as of noon ET and more than 4,000 were delayed, according to FlightAware data. That was far fewer than the almost 6,700 cancellations on Saturday and more than 9,200 on Sunday when the FAA halted all departures into U.S. airports.
"We slept here," said Beth Martin, who was trying to travel home to Birmingham, Alabama, from New York's LaGuardia Airport on Sunday at the end of her daughter's birthday trip. They were booked for Saturday night, and when delay announcements started rolling in from Delta Air Lines, they decided to make good use of the extra time: after strolling through Central Park, they went window shopping on Fifth Avenue.
But when the flight was canceled, the standby list on a backup flight looked grim, and their original midtown hotel was charging about $700 for an additional night, the two of them slept at LaGuardia on Saturday. She said they found wheelchairs to sleep in outside security.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on Saturday tied the issue to a router and work to update from copper wires, a system overseen by L3Harris Technologies, to a fiber-optic system. FAA administrator Bryan Bedford said the upgrades were part of "routine" maintenance to switch over to fiber optic.
"We are supporting the FAA in its investigation to understand the conditions that led to the Nov. 13 ground stop of our nation's air travel," L3Harris said in a statement Saturday afternoon.
Airlines waived change fees and fare differences and offered pilots and flight attendants extra pay to ease the delays.
Customers told CNBC they were booked on several flights before getting on board.
Justine Fritz, who works in sales for a consumer goods company, was in New York for a business event on Friday. She tried five different flights before getting on a flight to Houston, then flew four hours out of her way to get back to Minneapolis after her Saturday flight was canceled. Fritz said she had so many boarding passes that TSA wouldn't let her through security at first.
"It's been bananas," she told CNBC at the gate. Fritz said she made the best of it by shopping and getting a haircut, but she's still disappointed.
"I'm missing the first hour of the Vikings game," she said.
Martin said her trip home with her daughter will take even longer. Delta booked them to Memphis, and her husband will drive the four hours from Birmingham to pick them up.
Shortly after the groundstop, the longest since 9/11, Duffy pushed Congress for as much as $50 billion for upgrades to the aging U.S. air traffic control system. A day later, Democratic lawmakers pushed back, citing unspent money from existing funding, which includes Congress's approval last year of $12.5 billion for airport and air traffic control improvements over five years.
"Our committee, on behalf of the flying public, will hold the administration accountable for what happened to make sure this chaos does not happen again," said Reps. Rick Larsen (D.-Wash.), ranking member of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, and Rep. Andre Carson (D.-Ind.), ranking member of the aviation subcommittee, said in a joint statement.
