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US air travel returns to normal after technology breakdown

A display shows flights, many delayed, at LaGuardia Airport in New York, Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2023. A computer outage at the Federal Aviation Administration brought flights to a standstill across the U.S. on Wednesday, with hundreds of delays quickly cascading through the system at airports nationwide. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
A display shows flights, many delayed, at LaGuardia Airport in New York, Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2023. A computer outage at the Federal Aviation Administration brought flights to a standstill across the U.S. on Wednesday, with hundreds of delays quickly cascading through the system at airports nationwide. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig) A display shows flights, many delayed, at LaGuardia Airport in New York, Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2023. A computer outage at the Federal Aviation Administration brought flights to a standstill across the U.S. on Wednesday, with hundreds of delays quickly cascading through the system at airports nationwide. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

By DAVID KOENIG and TOM KRISHER / AP Business Writers 5 min read

U.S. air travel returned mostly to normal Thursday, a day after a computer system that sends safety information to pilots broke down and grounded traffic from coast to coast.

By midafternoon on the East Coast, about 150 flights had been canceled and more than 3,700 delayed — much lower figures than on Wednesday, when more than 1,300 flights were scrubbed and 11,000 delayed.

Attention turned to the federal agency where the technology failure apparently started hours before it inconvenienced more than 1 million travelers.

The Federal Aviation Administration said a damaged database file appeared to have caused the outage in the safety-alert system. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg promised a thorough examination to avoid another major failure.

“Our immediate focus is technical — understanding exactly how this happened, why the redundancies and the backups that were build into the system were not able to prevent the level of disruption that we saw,” Buttigieg told reporters.