WASHINGTON (AP) — The government wants to be sure to determine the “root cause” of the problems that have led to the grounding of planes across the United States before making big changes to air traffic control, the nation’s transportation chief said Sunday. President Donald Trump broke his silence on the extraordinary disruptions that have hampered air travel and raised troubling questions about how a system so integrated into the country could be so vulnerable.
Officials are analyzing two routers installed in recent weeks at Federal Aviation Administration facilities in Arkansas and Texas, according to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who in appearances on five television news shows has stepped up his push for Congress to provide billions more to upgrade a system that he says had been neglected for decades.
READ MORE: Why a problem on the ground can affect flights thousands of miles away, among other problems
He was the public face of the administration seeking to assure travelers that it was possible to fly safely as airports and airlines worked to restore normal operations following Friday’s national shutdown.
“We’re going to figure out what the root cause was and then move forward from there,” he said.
Trump was noticeably silent for 2 days
Trump made no comments publicly or on social media after the ground control order Friday afternoon. He had posted statements on social media on unrelated topics, while frustrated passengers found themselves stranded and his team and airlines rushed for a return to normal travel operations.
Trump spoke in a post on Truth Social on Sunday morning, saying his administration had begun to modernize the air traffic control system, but that this task should not be accomplished “in a piecemeal fashion.” The Republican-controlled Congress last year approved $12.5 billion for the FAA as part of the party’s sweeping tax-cut package, but Duffy called the money a down payment on a broader overhaul of the aging system.
“If Congress approves the money air traffic control desperately needs, we can build it quickly and efficiently,” Trump wrote. “It will be the BEST SYSTEM in the world. Much of our current air traffic control system is 50 years old – RIDICULOUS!”
In another post, he accused Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration of making “an old and failing system worse than when it started.”
Biden signed a massive infrastructure bill in the first year of his presidency, setting aside $25 billion for the FAA to improve airports and its traffic control towers, redevelop airport terminals and “improve the foundation” of the air traffic control system, according to the agency.
Duffy says upgrades ready to roll out ‘tomorrow’ if he gets the money
“I can’t apologize for what was handed down to us. And I can’t blame the Republicans or the Democrats, because it’s both. It goes back 20, 25, 30 years of lack of investment,” Duffy said in one of his interviews.
In an article on other engineers were also involved. He said the problem started when the federal contractor was replacing a section of old copper wire with new fiber wire, somehow causing the system to overload.
READ MORE: Thousands of flights canceled as airlines struggle to recover from nationwide layover
After the cable was replaced at the El Dorado, Arkansas, site and the router was powered on, a problem occurred at a facility in Amarillo, Texas, impacting the ground stop. “We didn’t think this was supposed to happen or was going to happen,” he said.
Billions are needed, he said, to build a “completely new architecture” for the network, and he said companies like AT&T, Verizon and Lumen are ready to deploy it “tomorrow” if the money is available.
Travel expected to return to normal by Monday
As for the traveling public, he said that “as we look to the end of the day and into tomorrow, we should be operating at full capacity.”
He added: “We are on the right track.”
Duffy said the administration feels “pretty good” that the outage was not the result of a hack. He added that various intelligence agencies have said they are not finding “the chatter or footprints that we would normally see if this was a cyberattack.”
Duffy says Trump was engaged
Trump, although he made no public comments before Sunday, appeared “fully engaged,” Duffy said.
“I was in constant contact. He was fully engaged because it’s important to him and to America,” the Cabinet member said.
Duffy has appeared on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” CNN’s “State of the Union,” “Fox News Sunday,” NBC’s “Meet the Press” and ABC’s “This Week.”
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