COLUMBUS, Ohio – When the Federal Aviation Administration suffered a system outage Wednesday, thousands of travelers in Ohio and across the country found themselves without a flight.
What You Need To Know
- The FAA grounded thousands of domestic flights due to a safety system outage early Wednesday morning
- Flights were given clearance to resume at 9 a.m. Wednesday
- There were more than 9,000 delays, according to FlightAware.com
“It’s just cancellations, delay after delay after delay,” said Qu Twilley, a United flier who was trying to catch a 6 a.m. flight on Wednesday at John Glenn Columbus International Airport.
His experience was shared with thousands of Americans across the U.S. due to the outage. Twilley was headed to Phoenix for a work conference, but never boarded his flight.
“After the third delay, I figured it’d probably be best because they set the whole itinerary back,” said Twiley. “It’ll be a waste of resources since I will be missing out on the conference that I was being sent to.”
While Twilley gave up, John Brennan attempted to get to his destination twice.
While he was supposed to be on his way to Cabo with friends, instead he was one of the only ones in baggage claim Wednesday afternoon.
“They asked us to exit the plane,” said Brennan. “They said it’d be about two hours and then we would take off on time. So that actually lasted about three hours; we reboarded the plane and then they gave us the bad news that we would miss our connection in Denver, so they asked us to exit the plane again.”
As of late Wednesday afternoon, there were more than 9,000 delayed flights in, out of or within the U.S, according to FlightAware.com.
Both Twilley and Brennan said they had no problems communicating with their airlines.
Brennan even managed to get rebooked for a flight early Thursday morning.
“We’ll leave tomorrow. We’ll do this over again tomorrow,” he said.
