British Airways has confirmed that its flights between the UK and US are operating as normal, following a nationwide ground stop that brought air travel across the United States to a standstill.
Around 10,000 flights to and from the US were cancelled after the ground stop lasted about four hours on Friday. The disruption affected scores of UK flights early on Saturday, prompting the airline to apologise for possible delays and cancellations.
Airline apologises for disruption
In an update, British Airways said its flights were running as normal. A spokesman said: "Whilst this matter was entirely outside of our control, we want to thank our customers for bearing with us, and our colleagues for supporting them and helping to minimise any disruption."
Manchester Airport said it did not expect significant delays on Saturday, and the situation had minimal impact on London Gatwick Airport.
Rare nationwide ground stop
This is only the second time flights have been grounded across the US since the September 11 terror attacks in 2001. The previous halt occurred in January 2023 because of a system error.
US homeland security secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters at the White House that the introduction of new technology into an old air traffic control system overwhelmed it. He could not rule out another outage.
Officials assess cause and outlook
Mr Mullin added "it doesn't appear" that a cyber attack or rogue artificial intelligence played a role in the incident.
American transportation secretary Sean Duffy said he expected flights around the US to be "back up and operational as we come into the heat of travel" next weekend ahead of the American Thanksgiving holiday, but he also suggested more disruptions might occur. "We didn't think we would have this kind of outage. We did," he said. "We were able to review what went wrong, and then reboot the system and go. But, you will have more of these."
