Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy attributed Friday’s nationwide Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ground stop to aging routers and decades-old technology, urging Congress to approve $50 billion in emergency funding to rebuild the country’s crumbling air traffic control system.
Speaking at a White House news conference Friday evening, Duffy said the FAA began experiencing instability in its radar and communications systems around 3:36 p.m. ET, prompting the agency to halt all domestic flights out of an abundance of caution.
Duffy pinned the disruption on outdated switches and routers that became overwhelmed by data, leaving air traffic controllers with inconsistent information.
“We have old, old switches, old routers. We use 1980s little copper lines,” Duffy said.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blamed aging air traffic control equipment for Friday’s nationwide FAA ground stop, warning that the system would remain vulnerable to future disruptions without major upgrades. (Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters / Reuters)
Without a complete overhaul, Duffy warned, the nation’s aging air traffic control infrastructure would remain exposed to further failures.
“What went down was old, right? It was the old legacy equipment. It failed,” he said. “And listen, it’s going to continue to fail.”
The transportation secretary called on lawmakers to provide $50 billion to modernize the country’s air traffic control network, including replacing worn-out hardware, telecommunications equipment and control towers.
American Airlines planes remain at their gates, as a Delta Air Lines plane sits on the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport on Friday in Queens, N.Y. (Adam Gray/Getty Images / Getty Images)
“This is an emergency. I want Congress to give us emergency funding,” Duffy said. “This is bipartisan. This is American. I want $50 billion.”
While Duffy noted that the Trump administration had already secured $12.5 billion toward modernization efforts, he argued that substantially more funding was needed to finish the job.
The FAA’s previous modernization work has included a nearly $5 billion contract awarded to Rohde & Schwarz USA in April to replace as many as 462 outdated voice communication switches.
More than 40 of those new switches have since been installed, according to FLYING magazine, while federal officials have also reported replacing roughly half of the aging copper wiring used to transmit radar and communications data with modern connections.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy called on Congress to provide $50 billion in emergency funding to modernize the nation’s aging air traffic control system following a nationwide ground stop. (Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters / Reuters)
Duffy also said the newer equipment installed under the Trump administration had not suffered the same failures as the older infrastructure, and he argued that replacing the entire system outright would prove more effective than continuing to patch it up.
The issue, he insisted, should be treated as a national priority rather than a partisan fight.
“This is not one of those issues,” he said. “This is an American issue.”
The FAA reopened U.S. airspace at approximately 8:15 p.m. ET, though Duffy cautioned that it would take time for airlines to return to a normal schedule.
