FAA lifts nationwide ground stop, recovery will take time

At 8.15 tonight, Eastern Time, we've opened up the airspace. Now, does that mean every flight is going to fly? Right now, it's going to be slow, right? So if you're watching, you're at an airport, check with your airline. It depends on, do we have crews available? Do we have pilots and flight attendants available to fly your flight? We're going to try to move as many of those as we can tonight. If we have the capacity with crews to move those flights, if not we're going to start tomorrow morning with our airline partners moving those aircraft, but it's going to take us some time to unwind what's happened this afternoon. We have TDM telecom, so this is analog telecom. Our switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data and they went down. And I shouldn't say they went down. They started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers. And because of that, we shut the system down. Now, I have already replaced some of those switches with President Trump. And our new IP switches did not go down. It's the old hardware that went down. And I think the question for the American people is, Do you want your Congress to fund this? President Trump has asked for the money. He's asked the Congress on a bipartisan approach to say, give us the resources to build a state-of-the-art air traffic control system. Let's not do a patchwork, a fix to a system that's critical for every single family. It's not red, it's not blue, it's not Democrat, it's not Republican. It's American. Give us the money to fix it. Now, when we start looking at... Cyber threats, cyber attacks, typically some people is going to raise their hand up and say, hey, we did that. There's no chatter. We haven't seen any footprints, as you would say, or identifications of people that got into the system. It appears that this was mechanically driven. We're still looking at it. We're not ruling out anything. What it appears to be right now is as Secretary Duffy and FAA was going in and putting patches into the system, they were putting new equipment and new technology, and that new equipment, new technology just wasn't, it was overwhelming the older system, which is why Secretary Duffy made it very clear. The patchwork doesn't work. We need one complete system. We need someone to come in and build the whole system. Doing it nickel and dime it together does not work.