US flight cancellations top 3,300 on Nov 14 after air traffic control outage

The scale of the next-day cancellations shows how quickly a single communications failure propagates through the aviation system: the grounding itself lasted hours, but the schedule damage outlasted it. This matters less for any one airline than for the fragility of a system with little slack for recovery, and the disruption reaches passengers and cargo shippers well beyond the day of the outage. Whether the backlog clears at a normal pace or drags on is the open question, and the spotlight now falls on what redundancy exists in air traffic control communications.