Ground stop aftermath

Thanks, Dave. Okay, our top story this hour. It's been a long night for airplane airline passengers stranded during this nationwide ground stop. A four hour interruption on Friday. Many of those passengers now trying to rebook flights. A lot of them spent the night at the airport overnight. Fox 13's Heather Healy live at Tampa International Airport. And Heather, have you heard from any of those passengers yet? Yeah, we've heard from quite a bit of them, actually. You're going to hear from one, and it's kind of got a crazy story, Matt. But do you remember the couple that we spoke to last hour? They were kind of going to go on a whim and go to Austin for the weekend, and they said that their flight was delayed for 12 hours. So it was around 8.05, 8.15 when we talked to them, and then around 8.30 tonight is when their flight was going to take off. And literally seconds after we were done with our live hit, when we were done talking with them, flight got canceled. So they had to head back home to Tampa for... for the weekend and they're going to take one of those trips. For the next few weeks or so, when everything dies down a little bit. But over 150 flights delayed, 96 were canceled last night. FAA says temporary telecommunications outage caused the nationwide shutdown. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, he explained that aging equipment, it created instability in air traffic control communications, prompting officials to put everything into a halt out of an abundance of caution. So here we are on a Saturday morning, cancellations and delays, they're going up and up. That's supposed to be that's expected this morning as things are slowly but surely getting back to normal. I spoke with a passenger. He was originally going to fly out of Orlando up to Rochester, but it got canceled and he couldn't get out of Orlando until Monday morning. So he said, you know what? Let me take a lift ride. To Tampa, lifted from Orlando to Tampa this morning, $99 for that ride. What a steal. But I spoke with him about his experience. If he's ever gone through anything like this before, he says no, and hopefully he never has to go through anything like this again. But he has a flight back to Rochester from Tampa this morning, and I spoke with him on his thoughts about all of this. Take a listen. I'm also prior military, so the whole hurry up and wait process is cool, but I'd say the biggest thing that frustrated me was just the lack of accountability. Yeah. Yeah. So flights are slowly resuming here, although major airlines, they still have a huge backlog to clear, meaning Saturday morning, this morning is going to be a busy one here at TPA. As of their website right now, TPA's website, 91 cancellations, 53 delays. Those are going to go up and up again this morning, unfortunately, but check your apps for your airlines, whether you're flying Southwest, United, American, JetBlue, whatever, Delta, check those apps as well. See if your flight's on. If it's canceled, if it's delayed, so you can make those prior adjustments. But how crazy is that, Matt, going this morning from Orlando to Tampa via Lyft? 99 bucks. I was very impressed with that $99. But he is trying to find a way to get home because if he stayed in Orlando, he would have had to wait until Monday morning and he said he couldn't miss any work. So he's going to get home today. I think three o'clock is his flight up to Rochester. So hopefully it's a good thing that he is going home. But, I mean, to go through all that, how nuts. How nuts is that? How crazy is that? And his flight, $600 ticket. Yeah, what a mess. And when you think about all the vouchers, the refunds, the rebookings that this is going to take, it is going to be a log jam, Heather, for likely weeks to come. It is a mess. Heather Healy, live for us at TPA. Thank you.