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Travelers at Bradley International Airport impacted by FAA outage

The Connecticut Airport Authority said it expects flight disruptions to continue into Thursday morning.

WINDSOR LOCKS, Conn. — A nationwide halt to flights Wednesday morning led to a ripple effect lasting the rest of the day.

"We were ready to like board and they just kept stalling and stalling and you knew something was going on at that point I hadn’t turned on the news so I didn’t know what was going on," said Stacia Libby of Essex.

She was in Washington D.C. when the Federal Aviation Administration grounded planes from taking off for about two hours because of an outage to a safety information system.

But her trip back home to Connecticut ended up taking much longer than that. She landed about nine hours later than she was supposed to.

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"I had like seven flights today that were rescheduled and cancelled. And then I finally got a flight out," Libby said.

She’s not alone. More than 9,000 flights were delayed across the country and about 1,300 cancelled all together according to FlightAware.com.

For travelers at Bradley International Airport those impacts were felt several hours later.

"A little nerve-wracking cause there was really no information in the morning as far as if the flight was even going to happen today," said Michael Cavender, who was trying to get back home to Orlando, Florida.

"About two and a half hours, three hours," said Alexis Melendez of New Britain who was also heading to Orlando. "I could’ve been doing some other things than just sitting here," he said.

Though some were grateful their flights were delayed only for a short period of time.

"Just an hour. 40 minutes, 50 minutes," said Megan Yorio of Hebron. "We woke up this morning to the news that everything was grounded and we were just watching and waiting and we felt really lucky," he said.

The FAA says at this point it seems like the outage that caused all the chaos was due to a damaged database file. U.S. Department of Transportation officials said they’re also looking into exactly what happened. 

"To understand the root cause, understand how it could have led to this level of disruption, and understand how to make sure this doesn’t happen again," said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

The Connecticut Airport Authority said it expects the flight disruptions to continue into Thursday morning.

Passengers are urged to check with their airline for the status of their flight before coming to the airport.

Gaby Molina is a reporter and anchor at FOX61 News. She can be reached at gmolina@fox61.com. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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