ORLANDO, Fla. — After the Southwest Airline problems around Christmas in addition to weather delays, hundreds of travelers flying into Florida found themselves once again dealing with delays and cancelations on Monday, this time thanks to an air traffic control glitch.

What You Need To Know

  • The Federal Aviation Administration says an air traffic computer issue on Sunday forced it to slow the volume of traffic to airports across Florida

  • Some passengers faced several hours of delays, others had flights canceled
  • An air traffic control expert says the delays were not related to other recent rounds of delays, and calls the glitch a "rare event"

An air traffic control expert says it was a rare event, but that’s no consolation to people who’ve had to spend a lot more time airport than they wanted.

Julian Nomesque says his first time in Florida was a good one. He traveled from Boston to Orlando and met up with his mother for part of the holidays.

“I visited the parks with my mom, so it was a good trip, but the last part is so crazy man,” said Nomesque.

The last part of his trip – trying to fly back to Boston – was not so good. Nomesque says his Monday evening flight was canceled. His makeup flight on Spirit Airlines wasn’t scheduled to fly out until Wednesday morning, so he found himself stuck at Orlando International Airport for about 36 hours.

“Nothing you can do, nothing you can do man,” said Nomesque.

The Federal Aviation Administration says an air traffic computer issue on Sunday forced it to slow the volume of traffic to airports across Florida. Some passengers faced several hours of delays. 

Michael McCormick is a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach. McCormick worked in an air traffic control organization for the FAA and has 33 years of experience in that field. He says the issue out of Miami’s air traffic control center was with an automated processor, and that problem limited the info it could share with other airports.

“It enables you to handle increases in volume of traffic that occurs over time as more and more people travel,” McCormick said.

“So as you lose some of that automation, that means that you can’t handle those increases in the traffic, so you have to pull that traffic volume back to a safe level that the automation system can handle.”

But McCormick says it wasn’t related to other recent air travel delays and isn’t something we should see very often.

“This was an unfortunate time for something like this to happen, and it is not symptomatic of a larger problem or a trend that’s taking place across the system,” McCormick said.

“This was a rare event, or a one-off event that was rapidly identified.”

Nomesque says the delays with his flight forced him to miss two days of work back in Boston. He had to get creative to pass the time at the airport. 

“I have my games, my phone, movies, everything, so I’ll try to enjoy the time,” said Nomesque.