Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said workers for longtime government contractor L3Harris were doing routine maintenance to switch telecommunication lines from old copper wire to fiber at a remote location when it started flooding other routers in the air traffic control system.
An investigation is underway to determine whether L3Harris installed a faulty router or its workers made a setup mistake.
“We haven’t determined what the fault was,” Duffy said during a press conference on Saturday. “Was it the router, or were they not doing great work for us at L3Harris?”
Duffy said over 1,000 connection attempts occurred every four to five seconds, causing communication issues with airplanes and disrupting our radar feeds.
The instability prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to issue a ground stop until they could determine what was happening.
“This is a time that I think Congress can signal, ‘You know what? We Democrats and Republicans in the House and the Senate were willing to work together. We’re willing to work with [the Department of Transportation] and the FAA. We’re willing to work with President [Donald] Trump. We can fight on a lot of things, but we’re not going to fight on this,’” Duffy said.
Duffy also said that the Federal Aviation Administration’s new SMART system from Air Space Intelligence wasn’t connected to, or involved with, the older routers and communications equipment that failed yesterday.
“It’s a tool that gives a prompt to one of our flight managers that they can accept or deny, but it’s just better information flowing to them,” Duffy said. “But there is no connection from this tool.”
The ground stop on Nov. 13 lasted four hours and 21 minutes from 3:54 p.m. ET to 8:15 p.m. ET. (More)
