WASHINGTON (The Thursday Times) — Friday’s nationwide halt to flights across the United States began during routine work by a government contractor to replace an old copper telecommunications line with fibre, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on Saturday.
Duffy told a news conference that L3Harris, a long-standing contractor for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), was switching copper wire to fibre at what he called “a very remote location” when a router being worked on began flooding other air traffic control systems. That disrupted communications with aircraft and led the government to shut down the airspace for safety reasons, he said.
The routers in these facilities were made in 2001, Duffy said, and the old line “was such an old wire that it was being discontinued”.
“So what we’re working to determine was whether we had incompetence, meaning was it user error, installator error from L3Harris, or did they install a faulty router?” he said. L3Harris did not immediately comment.
No sign of an attack
Duffy said the government did not believe the outage was the result of a cyber attack, although an investigation was continuing. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford, who joined him at the briefing, said: “We see zero evidence of anything nefarious, and zero evidence of anything AI related.”
That answers one question left open on Friday night, when Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said officials could not rule out a link to a new artificial intelligence tool the FAA had begun rolling out across its air traffic centres. The company behind the tool, Air Space Intelligence, had already said its product played no part.
No flights were allowed to take off from the continental US for more than four hours from 3.54pm Eastern time on Friday (01:54 on Saturday in Pakistan). It was only the second nationwide ground stop since the 11 September 2001 attacks. The last, in January 2023, followed a failure of the system that sends safety notices to pilots, which the FAA later traced to contract workers who had deleted files by mistake.
Disruption into Sunday
Nearly 25,000 flights were delayed and more than 9,000 cancelled on Friday, according to the tracking site FlightAware. Cancellations ran past 4,000 on Saturday, about 14% of flights departing the US, according to the aviation data firm Cirium.
Bedford said airlines expected to have “full schedule integrity by the close of business on Sunday”.
Duffy said the FAA may be the last major American institution still moving from copper to fibre and from analogue to digital “because the investments haven’t been made, but this is not complicated”. He warned that a similar failure could happen again unless Congress approves money to upgrade the air traffic control system. President Donald Trump has asked for $30.1 billion for the work, and Republicans control both chambers of Congress.
