Democrat Scott Colom, who made history with his election to the US Senate by becoming Mississippi's first black senator since 1881, has revealed that he is stranded at Atlanta Airport amid a Delta pilot shortage. This comes following a nationwide FAA ground stop that reportedly caused 9,000 flight cancellations.
“I’m at the ATL airport and my @Delta flight has been continuously delayed because they can’t find another pilot. It’s midnight and they don’t know when or if they’ll find another pilot but won’t give out hotel vouchers until the flight is cancelled, which they can’t say when that’ll happen. This is a hot mess for Americans,” he wrote on X.
“One of them just said, “pick another flight…pick another transportation secretary,” he added.
{{/usCountry}}“One of them just said, “pick another flight…pick another transportation secretary,” he added.
{{/usCountry}}Deep Dive
Why was Scott Colom stranded at Atlanta Airport?
What caused the FAA’s nationwide ground stop?
When were US flight schedules expected to return to normal after the ground stop?
President Donald Trump previously praised Colom for courting some of his supporters in the final days of the midterm election campaign.
When Trump traveled to Corinth, Mississippi, last month to campaign for incumbent Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, he called Colom a “Marxist radical,” a “fake” and a “shameless phony who pretends to be a moderate.” However, during an appearance on Stephen A. Smith’s ‘Straight Shooter’ podcast, he later praised Colom for showing up to the Trump rally to mingle with some of the president’s supporters.
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“I heard it the other day, where I had a rally there, and we had lines that went 10 miles long, and he campaigned on that line, telling everybody on the line what a good job he did,” Trump said of Colom. “I give him a lot of credit for that.”
What we know about the FAA ground stop
MIA continues to face delays and cancellations after the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded all flights across the country due to a communications issue. On Friday night, November 13, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned that flight operations would be slow to return to normal. Airlines were working to reposition aircraft and crews.
FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said on Saturday that the US air travel schedule is expected to be back to normal by the end of Sunday, November 15, per CBS News.
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According to federal officials, the outage was connected to problems with aging air traffic control technology, including switches and routers that became overloaded with data and thus created inconsistencies in radar and communications systems.
The current problem was similar to a regional air traffic control communication outage in September. At the time, the issue snarled hundreds of flights across the Northeast, with the disruption being linked to a construction crew cutting a fiber optic line.
Aging equipment was also blamed for short radar outrages in 2025 that disrupted Newark airport.
According to aviation safety expert Steve Arroyo, the difference Friday was the nationwide scale of the disruption. It left controllers unable to reliably talk to pilots.
“If you don’t have that ability, whether it’s because the old wires that they have are just run down or for whatever reason, you’ve got to stop airplanes on the ground and not put them in the air, where you’re going to risk not being able to communicate with them,” said Arroyo, a former United Airlines pilot, per NBC News.