DENVER — Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg poked fun at the Trump administration’s response to Friday’s nationwide FAA ground stop, offering to help passengers find new flights as delays and cancellations continued.
“A quick public service announcement,” he told reporters in Denver. He said he would be at the hotel bar after the concert for anyone who needed help rebooking or seeking a refund under passenger rights.
Buttigieg spoke as the two-day “What’s Next” conference, hosted by Majority Democrats, came to a close. The gathering brought party leaders together to discuss Democrats’ direction after their midterm victories.
The FAA ended the ground stop shortly after 8 p.m. Friday, more than four hours after it began. Delays and cancellations continued through the weekend. The agency pointed to safety concerns and serious problems with air traffic control communications.
Buttigieg said he had no special information about what caused the disruption. He questioned, though, why the aviation system’s backup measures had not prevented an outage on that scale. He was also monitoring the situation as a traveler with a flight scheduled for Saturday.
He said the system is designed with multiple safeguards, so another component can usually compensate when one part fails. Why those measures did not prevent the outage, he said, was unclear to him.
Trump administration officials gave differing explanations as the cause remained under investigation. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said investigators were examining whether a contractor’s mistake or equipment failure was involved.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin later said the ground stop was not caused by artificial intelligence or a cyberattack, but by aging infrastructure in need of an upgrade. President Donald Trump also attributed the breakdown to the system’s age.
Friday’s disruption was the second nationwide ground stop since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The first occurred in January 2023, when the FAA halted domestic departures for about 90 minutes after an outage in its Notice to Air Missions system, which provides pilots with safety information.
The FAA said it found no evidence of a cyberattack in 2023. Buttigieg, then transportation secretary, ordered a review of the outage and directed the agency to explain what happened and recommend ways to prevent a repeat.
