The government wants to be certain it determines the “root cause” of the problems that led to the grounding of planes across the United States before making broad fixes to air traffic control, the nation's transportation chief said.
President Donald Trump broke his silence about the extraordinary disruption that snarled airline travel and raised troubling questions about how a system so integral to the country could be so vulnerable.
Officials are analysing two routers installed in recent weeks at Federal Aviation Administration facilities in Arkansas and Texas, according to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who during appearances on five television news shows stepped up his push for Congress to provide billions more to upgrade a system he said had been neglected for decades.
He was the administration's public face in seeking to assure travelers that it was safe to fly as airports and airlines worked to restore normal operations after last weekend’s nationwide ground stop.
“We’re going to figure out what was the root cause and then move forward from there,” he said.
Trump was conspicuously quiet for 2 days
Trump has not commented publicly or on social media about the ground stop that was ordered. He had issued statements on social media about unrelated matters while frustrated passengers were left stranded and his team and airlines scrambled for a return to normal travel operations.
Trump weighed in on Sunday in a post on Truth Social, saying that his administration has begun upgrading the air traffic control system, but that task should not be done in “drips and drabs”.
The Republican-controlled Congress approved $12.5 billion for the FAA as part of the party's sweeping tax cut package last year, but Duffy has characterised that money as a down payment on a broader overhaul of the aging system.
“If Congress approves the desperately needed money for Air Traffic Control, we can get it built quickly and efficiently,” Trump wrote. “It will be the BEST SYSTEM anywhere in the World. Much of our current air control system is 50 years old - RIDICULOUS!”
In another post, he accused Democratic President Joe Biden's administration of making an “old and broken system worse than when they began”.
Biden signed a massive infrastructure bill into law 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 “upgrade 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 apologise for what was passed on to us. And I can’t blame Republicans or Democrats, because it’s all of them. It goes back, 20, 25, 30 years of a lack of investment,” Duffy said in one of his interviews.
In a post on X, Duffy said contractor L3Harris Technologies Inc. had secured routers from the two FAA sites and was conducting “deep diagnostics” on the equipment; other engineers were involved, too. He has said the problem began when the federal contractor was replacing a section of old copper wire with new fiber wire, somehow causing the system to overload.
After the wire was replaced at the site in El Dorado, Arkansas, and the router was turned on, a problem then cropped up at a facility in Amarillo, Texas, cascading into the ground stop. “We didn’t think that should or would happen,” he said.
Billions are needed, he said, to build a “brand new architecture” for the network, and he said companies including AT&T, Verizon and Lumen are ready to deploy it “tomorrow" if the money is there.
Travel should return to normal
As for the traveling public, he said that "as we look to the end of the day and into tomorrow, we should be running at full capacity”.
He added: "We're well on our way”.
Duffy said the administration feels “pretty good” that the breakdown did not result from a hacking event. He said various intelligence agencies have said they were not finding the “chatter or the footprints that we would normally see if this was a cyberattack".
Duffy says Trump was engaged
Trump, despite making no public comments on the ground stop until Sunday, has been “fully engaged,” Duffy said.
“I was in constant contact. He was fully engaged because this is important to him and it’s important to America,” the Cabinet member said.
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