US credits system upgrade for longest nationwide FAA ground stop since 9/11 | Aviation news

Sean Duffy, the nation’s transportation secretary, said his agency “is going to hold people accountable.”

The top U.S. transportation official said ongoing work on an outdated telecommunications system could be the cause of a rare, hours-long ground shutdown by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which halted all air traffic within the country.

At a news conference in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy spoke about routine maintenance performed Friday to upgrade a router from copper to fiber in a “very remote location.”

Duffy said “a contractor error or faulty piece of equipment” caused the router in question to flood others in the country’s air traffic control system.

“We had 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds,” he told reporters at the Department of Transportation.

When these connection issues disrupted radar feeds and communications between air traffic controllers and planes, Duffy said a ground shutdown was ordered.

“When we see this, your safety is paramount. We have closed the airspace,” he said.

The Department of Transportation identified Friday’s maintenance contractor as L3Harris, a U.S. aerospace and defense company tasked with modernizing the FAA’s communications system.

“What we were looking to determine was were we incompetent, meaning was it… an error installing L3Harris? Or did they install a faulty router?” Said Duffy. “We have not determined what the fault was.”

Duffy added that L3Harris, who he said had done decades of work for the FAA, “did not measure up.”

“They own this network. They are our prime contractor. I can’t go anywhere else. They own it,” he said. “Or was it a faulty router? And we’re going to find out. And frankly, we’re going to hold people accountable.”

In response to Duffy’s allegations, L3Harris told Al Jazeera that it worked “in close coordination with the FAA” and placed safety and reliability among its “highest priorities.”

“We support the FAA in its investigation to understand the conditions that led to the ground shutdown of our nation’s air transportation on November 13,” an airline spokesperson said. “L3Harris takes seriously the nationwide ground shutdown and its impact on travelers, airlines and air traffic operations.”

While there were concerns Friday’s ground stop was the result of a cyberattack, the U.S. government said Saturday it did not “believe” that was the cause.

“Once we were able to isolate the work being done in that location, all of our systems came back online,” Duffy said. “So we don’t think it was a cyberattack at all.”

The FAA chief, who also spoke at Saturday’s news conference, echoed the transportation secretary’s remarks, saying the system failure was caused by an equipment error.

“We see no evidence of anything nefarious, and no evidence of anything related to AI,” FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said.

A root cause analysis will be shared with the public when available, he added.

As airlines and thousands of travelers begin leaving Friday’s stopover, the longest and second national stopover since 9/11, the FAA said the full integrity of the program is expected to be met by the end of Sunday.

“We have crews and planes that are not in position for the 12,000 flights that have been lost,” Bedford said. “These crews, pilots and flight attendants must get to their reconnection points with their schedules.”

Bedford said the FAA expects about 4,000 to 5,000 flights of the 41,000 scheduled for Saturday to be canceled.

“This will prepare us for a full recovery tomorrow,” he said. “I think the worst is behind us.”