Buttigieg criticizes Trump administration over nationwide FAA ground stop

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg took aim at the Trump administration over its handling of Friday's nationwide FAA ground stop, joking to reporters in Denver that he would personally help stranded travelers sort out their travel plans as delays and cancellations dragged on.

"I'll begin with a public service announcement," Buttigieg said. "I will be available in the hotel bar following the concert for anybody who needs to rebook their flights or get a refund per your rights."

His comments came as the What's Next conference concluded in Denver. The two-day event, hosted by Majority Democrats, gathered party leaders to chart a path forward following the party's midterm victories.

The FAA lifted the ground stop shortly after 8 p.m. Friday, more than four hours after it began, but disruptions lingered through the weekend with flights still delayed or canceled. The agency pointed to safety concerns and what it described as serious air traffic control communications issues.

Buttigieg said he had no inside knowledge of what triggered the stoppage and was following the situation as a traveler himself, with a flight scheduled for Saturday. Still, he raised questions about why the aviation system's built-in protections failed to stop an outage of that size.

"The system has many redundancies in it, so that normally, if there's one point of failure, something else can catch it," he said. "It is not clear to me why that redundancy did not prevent an outage of this magnitude."

Trump administration officials, meanwhile, gave shifting explanations for the failure. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the cause was still under investigation, including the possibilities of a contractor error or equipment failure.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin later said the stoppage was not the result of artificial intelligence or a cyberattack, blaming instead aging infrastructure in need of updates. President Donald Trump similarly told Fox News the system had broken down because of its age.

Friday's halt was only the second nationwide ground stop since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The first occurred in January 2023, when the FAA paused domestic departures for roughly 90 minutes after an outage in its Notice to Air Missions system, which supplies pilots with safety information.

The FAA said at the time that it found no evidence of a cyberattack in the 2023 incident. Buttigieg, then leading the Transportation Department, ordered a review of that outage and directed the agency to explain what happened and recommend measures to keep it from happening again.