FAA lifts nationwide ground stop as feds cite patch issue

Business as usual, perhaps at 9.30 at night, as people head on to their flights. And Jessica, I know you're talking to someone who has a pretty good idea of what's happening at the airport right now. I'm talking to Cheryl Bush. Cheryl, can you hear me? You're live on with Fox 2 right now on our stream. Yes, I can hear you just fine, thanks. And Cheryl, just give us your title, tell you what you do just to set the scene for folks, and then we'll get into a quick interview with you, okay? Sure. I'm the director of aviation for Oakland County's three airports, including our signature Oakland County International in Waterford. And Cheryl, describe what the last four or five hours have been like for you guys. Well, we were as surprised as everyone with the ground stop issued by the FAA late this afternoon, about 4.20, and stopped all movement on the airport other than medevac flights for emergency purposes. And we were just on standby waiting for more information. And Cheryl, you know, we've been talking a lot up here since we heard from federal officials about sort of this antiquated system when it comes to air traffic control and the aviation systems in general. Can you paint a little bit of a picture with of some of the struggles that you guys have dealt with in this this arena? Well, I'm here to tell you that. The picture that they portray on the antiquated systems in our control towers is 100% accurate. These systems are very old, very outdated, and are in much need of modernization. So we would be fully supportive of any type of legislation to support Congress's efforts in improving those. systems in the FAA across the nation. And Cheryl, we got Rupraj here. He has got a quick question for you. Yeah, Cheryl, does it bother you that so much of it becomes a debate and so much of it so politically charged when, in fact, people's, I guess you could say, convenience in this case and also safety depends on these systems being upgraded? It's not a political issue. We always say airports are not political. We don't care what party you may be affiliated with. Everyone wants to fly safely and get home to their families. Please. So. We don't view it as a political issue at all. We view it as a safety issue, 100%. And Cheryl, as somebody who is in charge of three different airports, how high on the priority list or how much of a concern is this system on a daily basis for you? I appreciate your candor, first of all, in all of this and being transparent about how things really are behind the scenes. Absolutely. No, it's a very top priority. We see how quickly that the system fails without 100% reliability with the FAA, and they drive all the movements in the air, so how quickly it impacts everybody on the ground, and this will continue to impact us now for the next couple of days. You don't recover from four hours of shutting down 5,000 flights across the country without I'm having that take some time to recover from. Cheryl, we've been talking with Brent Yaks, our cyber expert here, but I want to get your take on this switcher overwhelm. What is it that, what does that look like to have a switcher that's overwhelmed? What happens in those moments for them to have to do what they did today? Well, I really can't speak to that. I don't deal with those systems myself, but I've just been witness to what the concerns are in the towers, and I know that those systems need a desperate need for upgrading. When they talk about paper tickets, it hasn't been long since we've... And we've relied on that in our own tower at Pontiac, yeah. And what about you guys? How long does it take before you get up and running? And sort of when will things be, you know, quote, normal for you guys? Well, as soon as the ground stop is released, aircraft can be dispatched. And I know that we had 14 or 15 aircraft that were hoping to depart yet this evening. But as you heard the news broadcast, they'll be releasing those in terms of priority. And the commercial airlines will be the first to respond and then scheduled. Commuter-type airplanes and the general aviation airplanes could be among some of the latest to be released. So we'll be impacted by this for sure all day tomorrow and probably into Sunday. And Cheryl, before I let you go here, what do you want travelers to know that are sitting there wondering, hey, is this going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month? As somebody who gets an inside look to all of this, what do you want travelers to know, whether it's commercial or private? Well, I would just say, be patient, be patient when you're traveling and understand until these systems are updated, this can happen again. And I would much rather have my flight canceled than have a safety issue in route. So all right, Cheryl Bush, thank you for making time with us. I know it's a bit of an unprecedented situation for you guys the last few hours. So thank you again. No problem. All right. Bye bye. So here we go, continuing our coverage. We've been at it since at least 5 p.m. talking about this FAA nationwide ground stop that ended about an hour ago. But in that time, there have been so many questions as we have gotten some answers about an antiquated system and what needs to be done to fix it. At the meantime, we are actually joined by many experts. We had Evan Broad, who is an aviation expert who kind of unpacked and lifted the curtain for us there. Now we have also Brent Yaks with us. A cyber expert to talk about the systems. You're not an aviation expert, but certainly what is there here that we're not talking about so far that we haven't touched on, do you think, when it comes to these antiquated systems? Well, I think what people have to understand, because you think, why don't we just get something new? You go out to the store and buy a computer. Go to Best Buy and get a new one. This is not the systems that we're talking about. These are industrial control systems. These are large systems. These are ones that are built to be able to provide life-assistant services, right? I mean, these are planes that are flying that have to operate all the time. Very good point. So you can't just replace them. It's not that easy. That's why the budgets are so big. That's why it takes so long to do this. That's why it'd have to be planned out fairly methodically. So it's not something that can be solved tomorrow. We really do have to just, you know, get... Sort of the funding, if this is what they say they need, I think there needs to be accountability to it. But get the funding, identify the timeline, and let's move forward in replacing some of these. And what does this say about the vulnerability of this system to the rest of the world? I mean, obviously, it's an inconvenience. It could potentially be a safety issue for planes up in the air not knowing where to navigate. But here we are kind of underscoring for the world. Here, we're vulnerable. We're talking about very old systems here. Right. And so I'm not a political strategist, but I am a cybersecurity advisor. And I don't think the tone necessarily today in the press release. Instilled a lot of confidence around the cyber topic, so what we said was basically, hey, these systems are really old and they got overwhelmed and everything went crumbling down, that doesn't really instill confidence that everything is built to handle cyber warfare, so we do need to make sure that we still are covering those bases and protecting the systems from cyber. And, you know, we were talking earlier, and granted, it's a totally different system, but under this aviation umbrella, a huge investment in one of the systems kind of under this umbrella, switching kind of older technology to AI. Does AI fit into this conversation as we're talking about, you know, billions and billions of dollars that need to be invested? Is that the answer here? I know a lot of folks say, you know, everything's going to be AI, and that's the cure-all. Is it? Or what does the fix look like? I think in this case, what they're looking at from an AI perspective is really optimization of the system. We still need to get the infrastructure correct. We still need to build the foundation. That's not AI. That is just a solid infrastructure with redundancy in place. And then similar to what the smart system is from an AI perspective, it's just trying to make things better once it's working well. So I think AI comes into play down the road, but not. Today, it's build the foundation. It's make sure that it works. And going back to what we talked about earlier, this had happened before in 2009, a very similar situation, not quite to this scope. And again, you're not a political strategist, but when you're talking about 17 years between then and now, it really underscores not a whole lot has been fixed. We're talking about duct tape and some other quick fixes. We're still in the same boat that we were in 2009. I'd even be fearful that it's the same systems we're talking about. You know, so I would go back to 2009 and I would look at what are the investments that we've seen over the last 17 years and wonder how are we still in this analog system? How are we still managing the same, potentially the same devices? And where have all those investments gone over time? And it's interesting, you know, we just talked to Cheryl Bush. She runs three airports in Oakland County. And, you know, oftentimes when you hear airport officials and other officials, for that matter, they'll try to make a pretty picture for you. You know, don't worry about it. It's all fine. These officials from the federal level to our local, you know, airport officials are saying, no, this is a problem. This looks bad. It's just as bad as they're saying. And we need the fix. I appreciate their candor in saying all of that. And as a journalist who covers all different topics, that's not something you necessarily get. And that would say to you, too, as a strategist, as somebody who who looks at these systems, you know, they're putting a red square underline with all of this. I think everyone that you've talked to tonight, you know, during this whole, you know, entire grounding said the same thing, right? That, yes, they are old. Yes, we absolutely need to replace them. I do appreciate Cheryl saying, you know, look, this is for safety. You have some patience. We want to make sure you're protected in case something like this happens first and foremost. But, yes, of course, we do have to fix these systems. So I appreciate her view on that. And I agree completely. We have to fix them. But, again, the failure in this, the systems still work to protect people. So we have to remember that. Yeah, 3,500 flights were safely landed. And that speaks to, I think, what we heard from Washington a little bit ago. It wasn't a full failure. They had to turn everything off before they could turn it back on again. That being said, the timeline in which this happened, does that seem fast to you? Does that seem slow to you? About right for this size of system? So from around, you know, Late 3:40-ish, 4-ish, somewhere in that neighborhood until right around 8, 8:15 I think is when they finally lifted it. 2009 it was five hours, 2026 about four and a half, so yeah, it seems about right. And when you think about what you were doing in 2009, I think I was a sophomore in college. I've changed quite a bit. What hasn't changed is our air traffic control systems. I do want to ask you if you can explain it in a way that is a little more digestible as far as this over the router that was overhauled, that that needed to be overhauled, needs to be overhauled. Make it in a way that we can understand it. What happened? So, from what we can pull away from the press conference, there was a couple key things that they said in that press conference. One was they put in new equipment, which caused the older equipment to get overwhelmed. Very, very similar if you have an older car and you put in a new piece of equipment in that car, then everything else starts to break in that car. That's it. Very similar. So, that's kind of what they were suggesting. But they did say things like the systems were overwhelmed, which isn't very clear. To be clear, it just means that... They were handling way too much traffic, so they couldn't handle it all, so some just get dropped. Okay. And that's what their concern was. They said, look, this is very important information. We can't have some get dropped. So if we're seeing it get dropped, we just have to shut it down and fix it and find out what's going on. It seems like that's what they did. And do you think, you know, just surmising from the press conference, do you think that this was one specific incident that happened or that maybe there were some red flags ahead of time in the last few days and weeks that were signifying that maybe something really bad was coming like it did today? Normally speaking, there are some type of warnings or alerts or something that indicate, hey, there's problems with this handling the amount of data. Again, if we flash back to 2009, it wasn't one incident. It happened a couple weeks prior. And then they applied another change two weeks later, which caused the outage. So could there have been two updates and this was just a secondary portion of one update that caused the actual failure? It could happen. Absolutely. It didn't necessarily need to start today. It could have started a month ago. And you feel for these I.T. folks that were tasked with this and have been tasked for decades with trying to fix these problems without the resources that the feds pointed out today.