The Miami International Airport woke up this Saturday with 126 cancellations and 138 accumulated delays, a direct consequence of the total flight suspension ordered by the FAA on Friday across the United States for more than four hours, the longest grounding of U.S. airspace in 25 years.
The disruption, which affected the 22 regional air traffic control centers, was lifted at 8:15 PM on Friday, but airlines warn that restoring normalcy will take time as they work to reassign displaced airplanes, passengers, and crews.
Nationally, more than 2,500 flights were canceled this Saturday and hundreds more experienced delays, according to the flight tracking platform FlightAware, which recorded nearly 7,000 affected flights in total between Friday and this Saturday.
In Miami, passengers experienced scenes of confusion and frustration since Friday afternoon.
Elizabeth Claros found out about the cancellation while she was on her way to the airport: “It’s crazy because I was in the transport service, in the Uber. Suddenly, there were no flights, and I thought, how is that possible? Because I didn't receive any notification until I got here.”
John and Ashley Marello, newlyweds trying to fly to Milan for their honeymoon, described the difficulty of obtaining information at the airport: “The hardest part is trying to ask the people who work here and not getting many answers, so we keep checking the news and asking around to get an idea of whether we should give up or not.”
The FAA attributed the failure to an overload in the switches and routers of the analog system that manages communications between the control centers, infrastructure that dates back to the 1980s.
The Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, was direct in pointing out the problem: “We have old switches, old routers. We are using small copper cables from the 1980s. It’s an outdated system that has collapsed.”
Duffy also warned that the situation could happen again: "We didn't think we would experience an interruption of this magnitude. But it happened. We were able to review what went wrong, restart the system, and move forward. But there will be more episodes like this."
The Secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, dismissed the possibility that it was an attack: "We have not seen evidence that this was a cyberattack or an AI attack," although he kept the investigation open.
The Trump administration acknowledged that the outdated air system may fail again, and Duffy urged Congress to invest approximately 50 billion dollars to modernize it, even though Congress had already approved 12.5 billion in July 2025 and the agency had only replaced half of the copper wires with fiber optics at the time of the failure.
As for flights to Cuba, the connections from Miami operated this Saturday with mixed results.
Several services of American Airlines departed almost on schedule: flight AA017 to Havana took off with just a four-minute delay, and flight AA1519 to Santiago de Cuba even left nine minutes ahead of schedule.
However, World Atlantic flight 252 to Havana, scheduled for 6:30 AM, did not take off until 9:03, accumulating more than two hours of delay, and American was also experiencing delays with its services AA2705 to Havana and AA1579 to Santa Clara.
The FAA reported that general delays in Miami were 15 minutes or less by mid-morning, although this indicator reflects the overall airport conditions and not the status of each individual flight.
The authorities are confident that the system will be operational in time for the increase in travel for Thanksgiving, although Duffy made it clear: "It will take us time to resume normal operations. Our top priority is the safety of you and your families when flying."
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