US air travel outage: Sean Duffy blames an upgrade
By the AFREEQUE newsroom, based on TechCrunch, Leadership and P.M. News
The FAA on Friday banned flight departures across the entire United States because of a communications outage affecting air traffic control centres and radars. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy links the incident to a maintenance operation that he considers routine.
According to TechCrunch, the FAA on Friday suspended aircraft departures across the entire United States until further notice, because of a communications outage affecting air traffic control centres and radars. International flights will be handled on a case-by-case basis, and the agency says every aircraft has been accounted for.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says the outage followed a maintenance operation that he considers routine. A copper cable at an isolated site was replaced with a fibre-optic link, work entrusted to L3Harris, the agency’s usual contractor. According to him, a router then overloaded a communications system deemed critical: two points on the network were calling on it at around a thousand connections every four to five seconds. The FAA deactivated those two points, then stabilised the system. Duffy wants to determine whether to blame a handling or installation error by L3Harris, or a faulty router, and to revise the timetable for these operations: switchovers at major airports will take place at night, and those at isolated sites during the day.
Bryan Bedford, the FAA administrator, says he sees no trace of malicious action or any link to artificial intelligence, and points to faulty equipment. Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin said at the White House that nothing suggested a threat to the United States. He rejected any comparison with 9/11 ('This is not another 9/11'), ruled out any link with the current Microsoft outage, and acknowledged that officials still did not know the cause of the failure or how long it would take to resolve it.
The previous day, the FAA had announced the deployment of an artificial intelligence tool for air traffic controllers, although, according to their union, it was not consulted. For his part, Duffy is calling for more funding to modernise equipment, although Congress approved $12.5 billion last year for these upgrades. The FAA has committed to replacing, by the end of 2028, the systems that still depend on floppy disks.
Flight tracking data show more than 8,200 cancellations on Friday evening, then at least 3,000 on Saturday. At 5.20pm Eastern time, more than 9,000 flights were delayed and 440 cancelled, while around 3,100 aircraft were still heading for US airports, with no new take-offs authorised. Atlanta, Washington, Miami, Los Angeles, New York and Houston are among the affected airports; at Los Angeles, aircraft that had already landed could not reach their gates. United Airlines has stopped domestic departures, American Airlines is letting aircraft in flight continue on their routes, and NAV CANADA says Canadian airspace is not affected. This is the third measure of this kind recorded since 2000.
