The communications failures that prompted Federal Aviation Administration officials to issue a nationwide ground stop started when L3 Harris, a contractor managing the agency’s telecoms network, made a standard upgrade at a remote air traffic location, federal officials said Saturday.
The contractor was conducting work on Friday that was needed to replace aging analog copper wire with more modern fiber optic cable, Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, told reporters. The “routine” task was being done at a location remote and small enough that officials assumed a Friday afternoon upgrade would pose no meaningful disruption to the air traffic, he said.
That presumption proved wrong, as the changeover from copper to fiber started flooding the system with levels of data it could not handle, triggering a cascade of communications failures across the air traffic facilities that manage the national air space. Officials, alarmed at the scope of the problems, decided to issue a rare nationwide ground stop for hours.
As of Saturday morning, administration officials still have not determined whether L3 Harris or shoddy equipment was at fault.
“What we’re working to determine was whether we had incompetence, meaning it was user error or installer error from L3 Harris, or did they install a faulty router?” Mr. Duffy told reporters. “We haven’t determined what the fault was.”
Representatives for L3 Harris did not immediately return email and phone requests for comment on Saturday.
L3 Harris has been managing the F.A.A.’s effort to shift its antiquated communications system of analog copper lines to a nationwide network of fiber optic cable. Earlier this month, the company boasted that they had completed such upgrades at 70 percent of air traffic control facilities, a figure that F.A.A. administrator Bryan Bedford echoed at Saturday’s news conference.
Such upgrades — which Mr. Bedford characterized as “sustainment,” not modernization — are vital to ensure that the air traffic control system can operate safely, he and Mr. Duffy told reporters.
Officials were sure, Mr. Duffy said, that they had identified the origin of the problem; for instance, when they isolated the location and took it offline, the system’s functionality was restored. There was no evidence that nefarious activity, or the agency’s recent efforts to outfit its air traffic control facilities with assistive A.I. technology, had played a role in triggering Friday’s problems, he and Mr. Bedford added.
But the episode raises serious questions about how well the F.A.A. understands the potential vulnerabilities of their existing network as it makes patches and upgrades to antiquated technology.
The routers in air traffic control facilities, which became overloaded with over 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds, were mostly manufactured in 2001, Mr. Duffy said, and were out of service by 2006.
“Was it a faulty installation? Was it a faulty configuration? Or was it just a bad piece of faulty technology?” Mr. Bedford said, without offering a conclusion.
He added that officials would have to reassess their protocols, and “pivot” in the future to avoid causing similar sweeping problems when upgrading equipment.
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