A nationwide ground stop in the U.S. ended around 8:15 p.m. Eastern Friday night and some flights to and from U.S. airports have taken off.
However, normalizing air traffic after the longest flight stoppage in 25 years will be slow, authorities warned, and chaos continues at airports across Canada and the U.S.
Fernandes and Griffiths were expecting an easy flight to Orlando, Fl. when they arrived at Pearson International Airport Friday evening. Instead, they were met with uncertainty about whether or not they would make it to their destination.
“We met another couple that’s going to Miami, but we’re going to Orlando. Their flight is not grounded but ours is and we’re flying out at the exact same time with the same flight company,” Fernandes told Global News Friday.
She said when they arrived at the airport they spoke with an Air Canada agent.
“He said ‘I don’t know. The situation seems a bit dicey.’ But we can’t really leave because we could miss our flight,” Fernandes said.
The couple waited for a couple hours before deciding to go home and have only received a cancellation from the airline.
Other passengers across the country said they were looking into other options, such as renting a car and driving to their destination.
In a statement to Global News, Air Canada said it cancelled approximately 250 flights on Friday, affecting around 27,000 customers.
“This was a significant disruption, and its effects have carried over into today, with additional cancellations as aircraft and crews are out of position across our network,” Air Canada spokesperson Yasmine Mehdi told Global News on Saturday.
According to the flight tracker platform Flight Aware, 9,155 flights within, into or out of the U.S. were cancelled Friday. The same platform showed more than 4,000 flights cancelled by midday Saturday.
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Forty-seven cancellations were recorded at Calgary International Airport Friday and approximately 48 departing flights were delayed, a spokesperson said, adding that they could not confirm all disruptions were related to the ground stop.
A spokesperson for Porter Airlines told Global News that it will likely take through the weekend for schedules to return to normal.
“Passengers have been rebooked on the next available flight. If the new itinerary does not meet the passenger’s needs, they will be refunded to the original form of payment,” the spokesperson said.
In a statement on social media, West Jet said it was offering guests travelling to and from continental U.S., Mexico or the Caribbean, with travel scheduled between Friday and Sunday, the opportunity to make a one-time change, or cancellation at no fee.
In an update Saturday, Bryan Bedford, administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, said 41,000 flights within, into and out of the U.S. were scheduled for Saturday and the public could expect that between 4,000 and 5,000 of those would be cancelled.
“We will still have delays and cancellations today, but that will set us up for a full recovery tomorrow and based on everything that we’re hearing from our airline partners, they believe that they’ll be able to have full schedule integrity by the close of business on Sunday,” he said.
Bedford said every passenger would either be re-accommodated or will receive a refund but said “everyone should reach out to their air carriers directly.”
Disruption caused by ‘routine maintenance’
In an update Saturday, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said officials see “zero evidence” the disruption was caused by a cyber attack or related to any AI systems.
He said the disruption was caused during “routine maintenance” to shift the network from copper wires to fibre.
“It’s pretty straightforward work that we were doing yesterday at a very remote location. So what we’re working to determine was whether we had incompetence, meaning was it user error or installer error from L3Harris or did they install a faulty router?” he said.
L3Harris owns and operates the FAA air traffic control communications system.
Duffy said the FAA has been working for some time to replace antiquated equipment that will bring its communications systems up to date with the latest technologies.
The FAA already replaced thousands of old copper wires with fibre optic lines and upgraded hundreds of radio systems as part of the overhaul that began last year after Congress approved $12.5 billion in funding. Duffy said he is pushing for $30 billion more to complete the work.
“The number one mission at the FAA and our air traffic organization is to fly people to their destinations safely and we will air on the side of safety. We’ll keep airplanes on the ground unless we are 100 per cent confident we’ve got the stability and the resiliency to operate safely,” Bedford said.
“I’m confident, very, very confident that the system is operating as safe today as it was two weeks ago,” he added.
Friday’s halt was the second nationwide ground stop of all departures since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The other happened in January 2023, when the FAA paused all domestic departures for less than two hours.
– With files from Global News’ Colin D’Mello, The Canadian Press and The Associated Press
© 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
