Just hours after a tanker in New Orleans lost its steering and slammed into a docked river cruise boat, the city’s port sued to make sure federal investigators can seize the vessel that is owned by a subsidiary of a Chinese company.
All 197 passengers and crew on the American Heritage cruise ship survived Friday as well as the crew on the tanker.
Click to Gallery
The American Heritage river cruise paddleboat is seen on its side after being struck by the Atlantic Asphalt tanker ship in the Mississippi River, Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, in New Orleans. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Emergency personnel and crews work the scene after a tanker crashed into a river cruise in New Orleans, Friday, Nov. 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Matthew Hinton)
This image taken from video provided by Devon Flanagan shows people being helped out of the water after a tanker crashed into a river cruise in New Orleans, Friday, Nov. 13, 2026. (Devon Flanagan via AP)
The American Heritage river cruise paddleboat is seen on its side after being struck by the Atlantic Asphalt tanker ship, top center, in the Mississippi River, Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, in New Orleans. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Officials said 32 people were brought to the hospital, including two police officers thrown into the Mississippi River when the boat rolled. But none of the injuries were critical and eight remained hospitalized Saturday.
The lawsuit, filed by the Board of Commissioners of the Port of New Orleans, said the Atlantic Asphalt tanker caused at least $1 million in damage to its terminal. A judge issued a warrant Friday giving federal officials control of the ship for now.
The tanker has been towed away from the site, but it could take weeks to move the cruise ship, which remains turned on its side against a terminal in the Mississippi River, Coast Guard Capt. Melanie Burnham told reporters Saturday.
The first step is to make sure the 16,000 gallons (60,500 liters) of fuel on the boat are removed safely, she said.
Traffic has been limited on the Mississippi River, but Burnham said boats should be able to move both upstream and downstream soon.
The tanker appeared to lose steering, but the exact cause of the crash is not known, Burnham said. The National Transportation Safety Board was sending investigators to New Orleans.
The first warning people on board the American Heritage had was the tanker blasting its horn several times as it floated toward the cruise ship, passenger Joe Knab told WDSU-TV.
The hit was hard, and the ship immediately started leaning. The crew gathered everyone on the third deck to put on life vests and start getting them off the boat, but it suddenly rolled and sent Knab and about 100 other passengers and crew into the muddy Mississippi River, where the water was 66-degree Fahrenheit (19 degrees Celsius).
Tugboat operators, other cruise ship captains, nearby workers, police and other rescuers rushed to help.
“It’s fine now, but it was a little scary there at the time. I thought I was drowning because I kept bobbing underneath — and the water doesn’t taste very good,” Knab told the television station, still in the jeans he was wearing on the boat, now covered in mud.
Knab said he thinks he was in the water about 15 minutes. He laughed and said his 20 years in the Navy likely helped him.
“They taught us not to drown,” Knab said.
Knab was wearing a shirt from a Hilton hotel where the passengers gathered. The rest of his belongings were in the river. Somehow his cellphone still worked. He hoped to get on a plane soon back to Wichita, Kansas, but he was not sure how Friday’s nationwide ground stop was going to throw another problem at him.
Putting the life vests on the passengers as they waited to get off the boat likely saved a number of lives when the boat suddenly turned into the water, New Orleans Harbor Police Chief Melanie Montroll said.
“Whether it’s 10 feet of water or 200 feet, having those vests, having that population put those vests on and kind of float upriver while we retrieve them — I think was the best factor of success,” Montroll said.
The American Heritage was finishing an eight-day cruise to several Mississippi River destinations.
The Atlantic Asphalt is a 520-foot-long (160-meter-long) vessel. It had a final destination in New Orleans, according to MarineTraffic, and was sailing under a flag for the Marshall Islands.
The ship is owned by a company called Nave Shipping SA, which is registered in Monrovia, Liberia, according to the International Maritime Organization and was one of the defendants in the lawsuit filed Friday.
Nave Shipping is a subsidiary of the China State Shipbuilding Corporation, a sprawling Chinese state-owned conglomerate, according to the live shipping tracker MarineTraffic.
China State Shipbuilding Corp. didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment.
The tanker involved in the crash specializes in carrying large quantities of asphalt and bitumen, a semi-solid substance that is often used for road construction and roofing, according to MarineTraffic.
The American Heritage river cruise paddleboat is seen on its side after being struck by the Atlantic Asphalt tanker ship in the Mississippi River, Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, in New Orleans. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Emergency personnel and crews work the scene after a tanker crashed into a river cruise in New Orleans, Friday, Nov. 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Matthew Hinton)
This image taken from video provided by Devon Flanagan shows people being helped out of the water after a tanker crashed into a river cruise in New Orleans, Friday, Nov. 13, 2026. (Devon Flanagan via AP)
The American Heritage river cruise paddleboat is seen on its side after being struck by the Atlantic Asphalt tanker ship, top center, in the Mississippi River, Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, in New Orleans. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Airlines canceled thousands of flights across the U.S. on Saturday as they worked to recover from a nationwide ground stop a day earlier that left passengers scrambling for seats and disrupted travel around the world.
The U.S. air travel schedule should be back to normal by the end of Sunday, two days after what was the nation's longest ground stop in 25 years, Bryan Bedford, administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, said. He said airlines “will still have delays and cancellations” Saturday but promised that the “worst is behind us.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told reporters Saturday that a contractor had been replacing a section of the system's old copper wire with new fiber wire, and that work somehow caused the system overload, leading to Friday’s ground stop that lasted more than four hours. The work caused “intermittent” communications and radar gaps, according to Trump administration officials.
Duffy said officials were investigating whether contractor “incompetence” or a faulty router was the cause.
“Our contractor didn't meet the moment or the equipment didn’t meet the moment,” Duffy said.
The contractor, L3Harris Technologies Inc., did not immediately respond to requests for comment or issue a public statement Saturday.
The nationwide stop was the first since January 2023, when a key FAA computer system that sends notices to pilots malfunctioned, and the second since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Andrew Charlton, an aviation consultant, said Friday's stoppage affected about a quarter of the 45,000 flights in the U.S. each day.
“The knock-on effect of that is incredible,” said Charlton, managing director of Aviation Advocacy. “The aircraft doesn’t just fly from A to B and back ... and then stop. It then moves onto C and then over to E and around and around and around. It is, of course, exacerbated if you’re talking about long-haul flights, international flights over the Atlantic or over the Pacific.”
At airports across the U.S. on Saturday, passengers were still scrambling to figure out how to get to their destinations. Some waited out the chaos in hotels, others sprinted to snag rental cars and bus or train tickets. But many were forced to camp out in airports.
Others got creative. Video in Seattle's airport showed a passenger serenading stressed out travelers with classical music. The singer T-Pain and the band Hoobastank were recorded singing to passengers as they waited on commercial airplanes.
Dan Russell, 66, learned his connecting flight from Kona, Hawaii, to Fresno, California, was canceled a half-hour before boarding was scheduled in San Diego on Friday night. Hotels were full, so he and his wife waited at the airport for a rebooked flight on Saturday.
“There’s nothing you can do,” Russell said, as his wife, Mary, tried to nap on his shoulder.
A cheerful Southwest Airlines gate agent at Dallas Love Field greeted passengers at dawn with, “Good morning, good morning,” then repeatedly said all flights were full and asked passengers to have boarding passes ready to help keep flights moving.
In Las Vegas, Korean Mexican influencer Sujin Kim, known online as Chingu Amiga, said her Friday flight to Mexico was rescheduled for Saturday morning. Kim said she had never experienced anything like it, though she travels often and “I always lose my suitcase.”
“Many people ended up sleeping at the airport, too, but thank God we managed to find a room,” she said.
At the Newark, N.J., airport, Umi Egchi was trying to figure out when his flights would line up so he could return home to Japan.
“I’m not sure exactly what happened. I just want to go home,” said Egchi, who had a sleep mask on top of his head.
Sports teams that traveled for games this weekend adjusted game start times, and No. 19 Mississippi’s game at Oklahoma was delayed a full day to Sunday.
FlightAware, a website that tracks flights, said more than 4,100 flights had been canceled Saturday. Cirium, a similar site, put that number above 3,200 flights.
Duffy reiterated Saturday that no one was in any danger as more than 3,000 flights in the air at the time of the grounding order landed safely.
Trump administration officials also blamed Congress for failing to approve more funding to replace the decades-old technology that helps manage the U.S. air traffic. Duffy said that 70% of the system had been replaced with fiber optic wire but that his agency also needs new air traffic control towers and runways.
The FAA has replaced thousands of old copper wires with fiber optic lines and upgraded hundreds of radio systems as part of an overhaul that began last year after Congress approved $12.5 billion in funding. Duffy and the White House are pushing for $30 billion more to complete the work.
“We have aging infrastructure throughout the airspace,” Duffy said, while stressing that flying remains safe. “You won’t get to your destination if we don’t think you can get there safely.”
In a moment that perhaps only further underscored the Transportation Department’s struggling systems, Duffy’s news conference Saturday morning began with audio troubles that forced last-minute microphone swaps.
Although Duffy said he had repeatedly spoken with President Donald Trump since the ground stop began, the president has largely been quiet on the topic. He has not spoken publicly on the matter, nor issued statements via social media, although he commented on other things. He spoke on the phone with a Fox News reporter, but that was not on camera.
Charlton, the aviation consultant, pointed to the difficulties of updating a system that can never shut down.
“What you’re watching here is trying to change the tires of your car when the car’s going at 80 miles an hour down the expressway, because nothing stops in aviation,” Charlton said.
The problem appeared similar to a regional air traffic control communication outage in September that snarled hundreds of flights across the Northeast. That disruption was linked to a construction crew cutting a fiber optic line.
Aging equipment was also blamed for brief radar outages last year that disrupted Newark airport.
Aviation safety expert Steve Arroyo said the difference Friday was the nationwide scale of the disruption, which 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.
This version has been updated to correct that Duffy said investigators were looking at whether a possible faulty router, not a faulty wire, might have been the cause.
Kruesi reported from Providence, Rhode Island, and Colvin reported from New York. Associated Press journalists Josh Funk in Omaha, Nebraska, Elliot Spagat in San Diego, Bernice Bautista in Las Vegas, and Hannah Fingerhut in Des Moines, Iowa, also contributed.
Passengers wait for their flights at George Bush Intercontinental Airport Saturday, Nov. 14, 2026, in Houston after the Federal Aviation Administration lifted nationwide ground stops. (Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle via AP)
Passengers wait in line at a baggage claim area at George Bush International Airport on Saturday, Nov. 14, 2026, in Houston, after the Federal Aviation Administration lifted nationwide ground stops. (AP Photo/Ashley Landis)
Two travelers sleep in the baggage claim area at Washington Dulles International Airport, in Chantilly, Va., Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, after the Federal Aviation Administration grounded flights nationwide. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)
An American Airlines flight takes off from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Arlington, Va., after the Federal Aviation Administration grounded flights nationwide, Saturday, Nov. 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Tom Brenner)
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, arrives for a news conference at the U.S. Department of Transportation, Saturday, Nov. 14, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Tom Brenner)
Visitors to the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center observation tower watch an airplane as it prepares to land at Washington Dulles International Airport after the Federal Aviation Administration lifted nationwide ground stops in Chantilly, Va., Saturday, Nov. 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)
Passenger watch as workers unload luggage from a United plane as flights are delayed at Los Angeles International Airport Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Ethan Swope)
Passengers wait as flights are delayed inside a terminal at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
The sun sets over Dallas Fort Worth International Airport in DFW Airport, Texas, Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, after the Federal Aviation Administration grounded flights nationwide. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez)
A passenger moves through Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International airport as all flights are canceled or delayed, Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
People wait at a terminal at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, in Arlington, Va., after the FAA issued a nationwide ground stop. (AP Photo/Tom Brenner)
An agent helps travelers at a ticketing desk at LaGuardia Airport in New York, Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, after the Federal Aviation Administration grounded flights nationwide. (AP Photo/Ryan Murphy)
