Flight Delay | featured news

President Barack Obama has signed into law a bill to end furloughs of air traffic controllers. The furloughs stemmed from the automatic, across-the-board spending cuts that started taking effect in March. Millions of air travelers were affected recently by delayed flights across the country because of the furloughs.

The House gave quick and overwhelming approval Friday to legislation to give the secretary of transportation enough financial flexibility to bring the nation’s air traffic control system back up to full strength and end the mounting flight delays that had become a political headache for Congress. The vote came despite objections from some lawmakers that the nation’s air travel was being given special treatment.

With many air traffic controllers on unpaid leave, lawmakers criticized the agency for how it was handling the automatic budget cuts required by sequestration.

It was a tough start to the week for many air travelers as federal budget cuts led to cascading delays along the East Coast Monday morning. Some flights out of New York and Washington were delayed by more than two hours as the Federal Aviation Administration kept planes on the ground. The federal agency has said furloughs of air traffic controllers could lead to delays if there weren't enough people to monitor busy air corridors.

Flight cancellations and delays continued to bedevil American Airlines customers on Wednesday -- a day after a major glitch crippled the carrier's reservation system, leading to the grounding of its fleet for several hours."These computer system can get hung up waiting for data. If it never gets it, the system can get overloaded and leads to a shutdown," said Dr.

If Kerry Drake missed his connecting flight, he wouldn't get to the hospital in time to say goodbye to his mother. Drake got the news on the morning of January 24 that his mother, who had been ill for years from rheumatoid arthritis and had been especially sick the last four months, was dying.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says U.S. airports, including Los Angeles International and O'Hare International, are already experiencing delays as a result of automatic federal spending cuts....

A winter storm heading for the East Coast has forced the delay of thousands of flights and the cancellation hundreds more during one of the busiest travel periods of the year.

United Airlines says it has fixed a computer problem that led to widespread delays for thousands of its passengers. The outage lasted for about two hours Thursday morning. The problem was that dispatchers couldn't send flight information to about half of the United's mainline flights.

As an American Airlines plane taxied for takeoff at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport on Friday morning, a flight attendant ranted on the plane's intercom, repeatedly telling passengers that she was not responsible for the safety of the plane and wrestling with another flight attendant for control of the plane's public address system, according to a passenger on the flight.