A nationwide ground stop that halted flights across the United States was triggered by what Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy described as seemingly routine maintenance work. Duffy said Saturday that copper wire at a remote location was upgraded to fiber optic cable by L3Harris, a longtime contractor for the Federal Aviation Administration. After that upgrade, a router overloaded a critical communication system, leading to the ground stop.
Speaking at a Saturday press conference that appeared to have technical issues of its own, Duffy said the work was straightforward and took place at a very remote site. He said the agency is trying to determine whether the problem was incompetence, meaning user or installer error by L3Harris, or whether the contractor installed a faulty router.
The FAA's acting CTO Rebecca Guy said the agency began investigating when its network showed instability. She said two places were pinging the network at a very high rate, a thousand connections every four to five seconds. Guy said the FAA disabled both right away, stabilized the network, and is now performing a root cause analysis.
Duffy has repeatedly insisted at multiple press conferences that Congress needs to provide more funding for aviation equipment upgrades. Asked why the upgrades were made at 3pm on a Friday afternoon rather than at midnight on a Saturday, he said switchovers at bigger airports will take place late at night while remote switchovers happen during the day.
This was only the third nationwide ground stop of the 21st century. More than 8,200 flights were canceled on Friday evening, according to aviation data firm Cirium, and the effects continued after the ground stop was lifted, with at least another 3,000 flights canceled on Saturday.
The ground stop came just a day after the FAA announced the rollout of an AI tool for air traffic controllers; the air traffic controllers union said it was not consulted in designing the system. FAA administrator Bryan Bedford said the agency sees zero evidence of anything nefarious and zero evidence of anything AI-related. He said the agency wants to be clear that it has an equipment issue and is working through what the defective piece of equipment was. When Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin was asked earlier if the ground stop was caused by AI, he referred to it as SI, or super intelligence.
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