Sitting on the first floor of Terminal 2 in Washington DCA, Michael Schimek does not have much faith in being able to complete his Friday plan: "going home" in Salt Lake City (Utah).
His flight was scheduled for 6:00 p.m. He was at the boarding gate when they told him that he would not be leaving. "I already have a hotel booked just in case. I can't think of what else I could do," he says.
Richard and Wanda are a couple from Washington who were preparing this Friday early afternoon to travel "for family reasons" to Cleveland (Ohio). They boarded, but the plane never took off from Ronald Reagan National Airport (DCA), the closest to the US capital.
"We spent two hours on the runway, waiting, we hoped we would get out," says Richard, who asks that his last name not be included. "At first, they told us that it was a communication problem, and they implied that it was something localized at this airport," adds Wanda. After a while, it became clear that it was a "much more serious issue, of national scope."
Both described "some nervousness inside the plane" until they finally let him disembark. They, at least, have it easier than others: they have hired a car that will take them to Cleveland. It will take six hours to arrive.
Passenger Rasciel Villegas, who is at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, maintains hope that his flight to Madrid with American Airlines will not be cancelled: "The flight will leave at 7:45 pm and boarding will begin at 7 pm, unless they give you a different order at the last minute. Before that, at 5 pm another flight left for Madrid. I see the airport as quite normal, I expected to find chaos, to be honest. But there is a flight here to San Francisco, they just canceled it, maybe they canceled mine too. I think they don't want to create chaos, and they could cancel at the last minute. They are also saying that they are going to review the international flights on a case-by-case basis, and one has just left to France. "Let's see if I'm lucky to go."
Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth (Illinois) is the highest-ranking congresswoman in her party on aviation issues, as well as an Army veteran, where she was a helicopter pilot. This Friday he asked in X for "an exhaustive and complete investigation" into the crisis due to the closure of the American sky. "I will demand answers from the FAA," he wrote on the social network.
Iberia has four flights in the air to the United States, specifically to the airports of Miami, JFK in New York, Los Angeles and Boston.
The Spanish airline is also waiting for some of its planes to take off from different airports. Two of its aircraft are ready to depart and the company's forecast is that they will be able to do so in the next few minutes.
Air Europa, for its part, has managed to land a plane in New York, and the second, bound for Miami, has two hours of travel left.
At the Spanish airports in the Aena network, arrivals from North America are not expected until early Saturday morning, so no incidents have been reported.
Throughout the afternoon, Aena's infrastructure operated normally despite the fall of Microsoft systems. The US authorities currently rule out the cyber attack or any problem related to the technology giant's crisis as the cause of the failure in air communications.
The United States Federal Aviation Administration ordered this Friday afternoon the suspension of all domestic flights "due to extraordinary circumstances and for safety reasons" due to problems in air traffic control communications.
The order affects thousands of flights across the country, while hundreds of thousands of passengers have been stranded without knowing when they will be able to resume their trips.
The Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, confirmed the interruption of air traffic through a publication on social networks where he explained, without giving many details, that a communications problem affects all air traffic control centers on routes in the country. "FAA technicians are investigating the problem," added the Trump cabinet member. The communications problems would be affecting air traffic radars and radio frequencies.
