US Flights Grounded: What to do if You’re Stranded? Will You Get Compensation? Details Here

Hundreds of flights in the United States were grounded on Wednesday after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) experienced an outage leaving thousands of passengers stranded.

It’s unclear how many flights will be affected, because some airlines may be able to operate without information from the system, known as the NOTAMS — or Notice to Air Missions – system. FlightAware, which tracks delays and cancellations, showed nearly 1,200 flights to, from and within the United States as being delayed as of 6:45 am ET, but only 93 flights canceled so far, CNN reported.

ALSO READ: FAA Outage: What is NOTAM & How Its Failure led to Grounding of All US Flights? Explained

The FAA said it is working to restore its Notice to Air Missions System. “We are performing final validation checks and reloading the system now. Operations across the National Airspace System are affected. We will provide frequent updates as we make progress,” it said.

While some functions are beginning to come back on line, the administration said National Airspace System operations remain limited.

The FAA has ordered airlines to pause all domestic departures until 9 a.m. Eastern Time to allow the agency to validate the integrity of flight and safety information.

What to do if You Got Stuck in Chaos?

Several passengers took to social media to complain of being stuck on planes on the tarmac for hours in airports in several different parts of the country.

If you got stuck in this chaos, you may not get compensation or money back in absence of any federal laws requiring airlines to provide passengers with money or other compensation when their flights are delayed to, from or within the US, Mirror reported.

In cases like this, the US Department of Transport has advised passengers to contact their airline if they will pay for meals or a hotel room. However, the carrier is not bound to compensate you.

However, passengers flying from UK to the US are covered under the laws of the United Kingdom and hence are entitled to compensation if their flight arrives their final destination more than three hours late and the delay has been caused by the airline. But in this case, they are unlikely to get any compensation because system’s failure is not the fault of airlines, Mirror reported.

Meanwhile, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that President Joe Biden has been briefed by the Secretary of Transportation this morning on the FAA system outage.

“The President has been briefed by the Secretary of Transportation this morning on the FAA system outage. There is no evidence of a cyberattack at this point, but the President directed DOT to conduct a full investigation into the causes. The FAA will provide regular updates,” she tweeted.

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