WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Transportation was working Saturday to determine whether Friday’s air traffic control system meltdown resulted from human error or equipment failure as travelers across the nation continued to grapple with a cascade of flight delays and cancellations.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the crisis began when a contractor was performing routine maintenance at a remote FAA location to switch telecommunication lines from 1980s-era copper wire to a fiber line.
The new equipment began flooding other routers in the air traffic control system — sending more than 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds — causing radar and communications disruptions, he said. As a safety measure, the FAA decided to ground all planes for more than four hours.
It is currently unclear whether the contractor, L3 Harris, or the piece of new equipment itself was at fault.
“This was an FAA system that didn’t meet the moment,” said Duffy. “A contractor didn’t meet the moment or the equipment didn’t meet the moment — and it caused the outages.” L3 Harris could not be immediately reached for comment.
On Saturday morning, thousands of planes were back in American airspace, but airlines warned it would take several days to recover and urged passengers to change their flights to later dates where possible. On Friday, there were more than 7,400 flight delays within, into, or out of the United States and more than 9,000 cancellations, according to flight-tracking website FlightAware.
The incident sparked barbed political discourse over who is to blame for failing to fix the aging infrastructure and frustrations over the initial lack of clear communication from White House officials.
“The Transportation and Homeland Security leaders were slow to provide updates, and when they did speak, they didn’t have good explanations about what was happening, nor whether it would happen again,” Rep. George Whitesides (D-Santa Clarita) said in a statement on X.
Whitesides, who was himself stuck in an airport for seven hours Friday, criticized the president for installing a Transportation Secretary with “basically no professional transportation experience in one of the most crucial jobs we have as a country.” Duffy is a former sports television personality, prosecutor, congressmember and CNN political contributor.
Trump, who rarely shies away from the spotlight, has not publicly commented on the unprecedented telecommunications outage. He had posted on social media about other issues, including criticism of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, but nothing yet on the airspace issue.
When asked about the president’s silence at a Friday evening news conference, Duffy said that Trump was “fully engaged” behind the scenes.
Duffy praised Trump for pushing to modernize the FAA’s infrastructure and securing $12.5 billion through his 2025 “Big Beautiful Bill” — a sprawling collection of tax breaks, spending cuts and other Republican priorities — to upgrade the nation’s air traffic control and airspace systems. Duffy called on Congress to approve up to an additional $50 billion in funding to fully modernize the nation’s aviation infrastructure.
Friday’s stoppage marks the second full ground stop since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York. The most recent full ground stop, which lasted about 90 minutes, was in 2023 when a pilot notification system went down.
Times staff writer Ana Ceballos contributed to this report.
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