Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy attributed Friday’s four hour nationwide flight ground stop to overloaded legacy routers and 1980s copper lines, calling on Congress for $50 billion to replace the aging air traffic control system. Speaking at a White House briefing after the Federal Aviation Administration reopened US airspace at 8:15 p.m. ET, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said patches, new equipment and new technology being installed by Duffy and the FAA “was overwhelming the older system.”
Duffy said instability in analog telecommunications and radar data began at 3:36 p.m. ET while more than 3,500 planes were in the air, prompting the FAA to shut the system down and halt departures nationwide at 3:54 p.m. ET until airborne traffic fell below 400 aircraft by 8 p.m. ET. He said newly installed IP switches stayed online while older hardware failed, and asked lawmakers to expand the administration’s $30 billion modernization request to $50 billion on top of $12.5 billion previously approved. Both secretaries said investigators found no evidence of a cyberattack and no link to Thursday’s Microsoft outage, while Duffy said the FAA’s new SMART AI advisory tool was completely disconnected from the STARS and ERAM systems and could not have caused the failure.
