Flight disruptions lingered on Sunday, two days after the Federal Aviation Administration grounded departures nationwide for more than four hours as airlines scrambled to get travelers and crews into place.
"We slept here," said Beth Martin, who was trying to travel home to Birmingham, Alabama, from New York's LaGuardia Airport on Sunday at the end of her daughter's birthday trip. They were booked for Saturday night, and when delay announcements started rolling in from Delta Air Lines , they decided to make good use of the extra time: strolling through Central Park and window shopping on Fifth Avenue.
But when the flight was canceled, the standby list on a backup flight looked grim, and their original midtown hotel was charging $700 for an additional night, the two of them slept at LaGuardia on Saturday. She said they found wheelchairs to sleep in outside security.
More than 1,600 U.S. flights there were canceled as of 7 a.m. ET and nearly 1,400 were delayed, according to FlightAware data. That was far fewer than the almost 6,700 cancellations on Saturday and more than 9,200 on Sunday when the FAA halted all departures into U.S. airports.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on Saturday tied the issue to a router and work to update from copper wires to a fiber-optic system. FAA administrator Bryan Bedford said the upgrades were part of "routine" maintenance to switch over to fiber optic.
Airlines waived change fees and fare differences and offered pilots and flight attendants extra pay to ease the delays.
Customers told CNBC they were booked on several flights before getting on board.
Justine Fritz, who works in sales for a consumer goods company, was in New York for a business event on Friday. She tried five different flights before getting onto a flight to Houston, four hours out of her way to get back to Minneapolis after her Saturday flight was canceled. Fritz said she had so many boarding passes that TSA wouldn't let her through security at first.
"It's been bananas," she told CNBC at the gate. Fritz said she made the best of it by shopping and getting a haircut, but she's still disappointed.
"I'm missing the first hour of the Vikings game," she said.
Martin said her trip home with her daughter will take even longer. Delta booked them to Memphis, and her husband will drive the four hours from Birmingham to pick them up.
