With flights grounded across the United States, Markwayne Mullin, the secretary of Homeland Security, sought to assure the public they were not in danger even as he acknowledged the Trump administration did not know the cause of what he said was a telecommunications outage that snarled air travel.
“Do we know what has caused it yet?” said Mr. Mullin, who took the lead of the Homeland Security Department in March. “No, we’re going to go through it. But I’m not going to make assumptions.”
Standing outside the White House, Mr. Mullin said he had been inundated with questions about whether Americans were in danger. He said they were not.
“This isn’t another 9/11,” he said. “I just can’t repeat that enough. People are making that assumption.” He added: “This is a telecommunication outage.”
The Federal Aviation Administration announced the rare nationwide ground stop on Friday afternoon, due to what officials said was a major outage affecting its air traffic control system.
“There is no indication, and we had no reason to believe as of right now that this was a threat to the United States,” Mr. Mullin told reporters. “This was a telecommunication outage throughout F.A.A. Out of abundant caution, we have grounded all the flights, and all the flights are accounted for.”
For flights in the air, Mr. Mullin said, they would be dealt with “case by case” and there would be a “priority list” for when those flights would land at their destinations.
“There was no indication as of yet that this was a nefarious attack against us,” he said. “It’s just a telecommunication outage as of right now.”
The nationwide grounding of flights is the latest crisis that Mr. Mullin, a former senator from Oklahoma, has encountered since becoming homeland security secretary. When he took over the agency, Mr. Mullin inherited an aggressive and widely unpopular immigration crackdown that resulted in the killings of U.S. citizens.
In his remarks Friday, Mr. Mullin praised President Trump, whom he said “took a lead in this immediately, and he gave us he assets and the communication to move forward in a fast way.”
As of Friday evening, Mr. Trump had yet to comment publicly about the aviation crisis. Instead he posted on his social media site his desire to pass tax incentives to lure more motion pictures to be made in the United States.
The post Mullin Says Nationwide Ground Stop Is a Telecommunication Outage appeared first on New York Times.
