US Transport Secretary asks Congress for $30 bn to upgrade aviation infrastructure

Planes returning to their gates, passengers heading back to the terminal, after a telecommunications outage brought departures across the United States to a halt. Just as we pull into the airport, we got a notification that there's a nationwide ground stop due to air traffic control issues. I felt a little frustrated because we're supposed to be home and I have plans tomorrow with a whole bunch of friends. Nobody quite knows what's going on, but I think I'm very impressed. Everybody's been very calm. Flights have resumed, but getting schedules back to normal will take time. The Federal Aviation Administration halted departures as a precaution, as controllers faced unreliable radar data and disrupted communications. Officials said aircraft already airborne landed safely, Homeland Security Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen said the evidence pointed to equipment failure. 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 Or, or, or, uh, uh, identifications of people that got into the system. It appears that this was mechanically driven. For his part, Transport Secretary Sean Duffy blamed aging telecommunications equipment. 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. This week, Duffy asked Congress for $30 billion to upgrade U.S. aviation infrastructure. And replace ageing equipment.