Trump’s transportation secretary has blamed archaic equipment found in a ‘remote location’ as the preliminary cause of the historic ground stop that halted the nation’s air travel for hours.
Department of Transportation Chief Sean Duffy told reporters at a press conference at the agency’s headquarters on Saturday that a contractor, L3 Harris, was replacing old technology at a ‘remote location’ when the air traffic control communications issue began.
Duffy said that a contractor was doing maintenance at at least one of four remote Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) locations and was switching lines from old copper wire to fiber before communications stalled.
He called L3 Harris the department’s ‘legacy provider,’ accusing the contractor of failing to ‘meet the moment,’ causing the outage.
‘What we’re working to determine was whether we had incompetence – meaning, was it user error or installation error from L3 Harris — or did they install a faulty router? We haven’t determined what the fault was. Was it the router? Or were they not doing great work for us at L3 Harris?’ he continued.
Duffy said the wire being replaced was so old it was being discontinued, prompting the routine maintenance.
He explained that as the wire was being replaced from copper to fiber, it flooded other routers and disrupted the radar feeds, making it difficult for air traffic control to communicate.
Duffy reiterated that officials do not believe the incident resulted from a cyberattack. He added that once the issue was detected at the FAA’s remote location, communications came back.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said a contractor was performing maintenance at a ‘remote location’ for the FAA when the communications issue arose
The FAA issued a historic ground stop on Friday afternoon. Passengers were stranded and are pictured above attempting to fly on Saturday morning after the order was lifted
The halt lasted for about five hours. More than 3,500 airplanes were in the air when the ground stop was issued on Friday
Duffy once again emphasized his demand for increased funding for the FAA. He said air traffic control still uses equipment from the 1970s and 80s, pushing Congress to approve billions to modernize air travel.
The transportation secretary said L3 Harris owns the telecommunications system the FAA uses.
He revealed that he preferred to work with telecom companies like AT&T and Verizon, but was ‘stuck’ with L3 Harris until the FAA receives more funding.
‘Many of our contractors, many of our partners, they take our money and they provide really poor service to us, full stop. And we have demanded more,’ Duffy said.
‘We need L3 Harris, or whoever provided that router to us, to do a better job.’
FAA Chief Bryan Bedford added that the ground stop was ordered because officials could not find the source of the communications issue for about 45 minutes.
There were 50,000 flights scheduled across the US when the ground stop occurred, and 30,000 have now been completed, Bedford said.
Of the 40,000 flights scheduled on Saturday, Bedford said about 4,000-5,000 will likely be canceled.
The FAA chief said that although cancellations and delays will continue throughout the weekend, flights should operate normally by the end of the day on Sunday.
Bedford clarified that the telecommunications did not go ‘down,’ but ‘instability’ was detected, resulting in the ground stop out of caution.
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