Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blames aging copper wire for nationwide FAA ground stop

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is speaking about the ground stop at this hour. Let's listen in. And it's not just old equipment. We have an incredibly old telecommunication system. Next time. And so here's what we believe happened yesterday. In at least one of our remote FAA locations, a contractor was doing routine maintenance to switch telecommunication lines from old copper wire, and they were bringing it over to fiber. That contractor that does the work for us is L3Harris. They're our legacy provider. They've been working for the FAA for over 20 years. And the network that we use at the FAA to control the airspace, L3Harris actually owns that network. Now, the work happening was due to the age of the copper wire that we were replacing. It was such an old wire that it was being discontinued, meaning that line was going to get shut down. So we had to switch it over from old copper, we had to bring it over to fiber, going from TDM to IP or from analog to digital. I want to be clear, this work has been happening in America for decades. Virtually every single institution in America has gone from copper to fiber. From analog to digital, I just maybe the FAA is the last one to be doing this work because the investments haven't been made. But this is not complicated. It's pretty straightforward work that we were doing yesterday at, again, a very remote location. So what we're working to determine was whether we had incompetence, meaning was it user error or installator error from L3Harris, Did they install a faulty router? We haven't determined what the fault was. Was it the router or were they not doing great work for us at L3 Harris? Either through contractor error or a faulty piece of equipment, that router that was being replaced as we switched from copper to fiber, it started flooding other routers in our air traffic control system. So specifically, we had over 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds. And what that did was gave us issues with our communication with... Airplanes, and it also caused some disruption with our radar feeds. And when we see that, your safety is paramount. We shut down the airspace. And we do it safely, we get you on the ground, and then we work on isolating the problem and then opening the airspace back up, which is what we did yesterday. As we get more information, we'll give this to you, but I think it's pretty clear a lot of questions came in yesterday. Was this a cyber attack? Did some foreign nation attack this network? And the answer to that is we don't believe so. Once we were able to isolate the work that was being done at this remote location, all of our systems came back online. So we don't believe this was cyber at all. This was an FAA system that didn't meet the moment. Our contractor didn't meet the moment, or the equipment didn't meet the moment and cause the outages. I've been talking about this for almost two years and I've been asking the Congress for money. I've asked for a lot of money. Now the Congress gave me a partial payment. They gave me twelve and a half billion dollars and one of the problems that we had was they weren't quite sure that we would spend the money well and we'd build with the money. And that's history of the FAA that goes back from Republicans and Democrats. They haven't spent the money well. So they want to make sure we're going to spend and spend it well. And we have. And so in the course of the last year, since I've got that $12.5 billion, I want to talk to you about what we've actually accomplished. So we have replaced 69%. Of the copper communications, we've moved that over to high-speed fiber, 69%. We've deployed surface awareness initiative technology at 143 control towers. So instead of just looking out of the tower with binoculars, we have a digital screen and representation of the airfield, giving an extra tool for air traffic controllers to drive safety, whether there's weather or fog or there's an issue with line of sight. Drive safety into the airspace. We've converted 469 radio sites to modernize those systems. So using 30-year-old radios, upgrading them to have crisper, clearer communication between air traffic controllers and pilots is critical because we rely on this communication to keep the airspace safe. We've installed electronic flight strips at 25 towers. We still use paper flight strips which is 1970s technology. An airplane is passed from one controller to the next using a paper flight strip. We're moving to electronic flight strips. 25 towers have already been converted. We've installed 224 IP voice switch systems at towers. We've installed 18 new tower simulator systems, and we've installed nine SMR-4 surface movement radars. So we are building. We are building safely, but we are building fast. And I think at this point, if the Congress looks at what we've done and the fact that this is a bipartisan movement, I hope that they meet this moment. And they invest in what will be the state-of-the-art, the best-in-class, best-in-the-world air traffic control system. When I came in, President Trump, before the DCA air crash, was saying, we have to modernize our airspace. I want you to work on modernizing air traffic control. He said it from before I was sworn in. And when we have a president who's willing to lean in and lead on an issue like this, and then if you look at the Congress, that you have both Democrats and Republicans who understand how important this is, For me, it gets to be frustrating where everyone says they want to do it, and the president is pushing it, but we don't get the resources. And I think this is the moment, if we don't start to switch out our systems, how long are we going to wait, America? In Congress. And I think this is a sign for them to lean in. This is bipartisan. By the way, most of the money that's spent is spent in Democrat cities. That's where our biggest airports are at. In Democrat states, this is where the money is deployed. And it drives efficiency in the airspace, but it more importantly drives safety in the airspace. Americans want less delays. They want less cancellations. We have I want to be clear on this, we have the safest airspace in the world. No one competes with us on safety. And by the way, we have the busiest airspace in the world, meaning we have more commercial and general aviation, bar none. No one comes close to what we do in our airspace. And if you look at what happened yesterday, I think that underscores the point that you have men and women who know how when we're going to land planes and land them in a short period of time, they do it really well. The training of the pilots and the controllers is exceptional. But we should rely on their training, should our air traffic control system go down, we should be able to rely on our air traffic control system, making sure it works. And what I appreciate the president, I've had a number of conversations with him, and he's passionate about it. I've talked to a number of Democrats and Republican legislators, leaders. They, too, are passionate. So I think this is the time and the moment. But the president, I thought it was great. In my phone calls with him, he said, you know what, I – I want you to know that I will commit every resource of the federal government, whatever you need. I'm willing to give those resources to the FAA to make sure you guys can do this, do it fast, do it right. So let's not let the legacy of the past, where investments weren't made, investments weren't made, which is why we are here today, let's make the investments and look forward to a brighter future in aviation, a safer future, a more efficient future in aviation. And I think this is one of those moments when if you look at A lot of the partisanship in Washington, and there's a lot, there's a lot of disagreement. We just came out of an election. This is a time that I think the Congress can signal, you know what, we Democrats and Republicans in the House and the Senate, we're willing to work together. We're willing to work with DOT and the FAA. We're willing to work with President Trump. We can fight on a lot of things, but we're not going to fight on this. We're going to work with you. We want to test your numbers. We want to push your numbers. We want to make sure you're doing what you say you're going to do. But we're going to give you the dollars to make sure you make these investments on behalf of the American people. And so I hope they'll do that with us. We'll continue to communicate with the Hill. But this is a bipartisan moment that I think our kids and our grandkids can look back on and say, thank you. Thank you, this Congress, at this moment, with this president. Thank you for leading. In fixing a system that has been sorely underinvested in. This is the moment to get this done. No better moment than now. So with that, I want to thank Administrator Bedford. He has done just a fantastic job with modernization, leading the FAA. He left a great job running an airline and came in, and I'm not sure you're happy with that right now, Mr. Administrator, but he's done wonderful work. I want to pass it off to him to give you an update on where we're at with the airspace. Brian. Thank you, Mr. Secretary. That was Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy talking about the nationwide ground stop yesterday. And really fast, if you're just joining us, he did say they don't believe it was a cyber attack, but are blaming a routine transition from old equipment to new equipment, specifically aging copper wire being transitioned to fiber. He says they are working to determine whether this was an installator error or was it a faulty piece of equipment that was installed. So I'm sure we will get a lot more answers in the coming days. But meantime, this still is causing a ripple effect at airports across the country. So let's turn to Danielle. She has been at Sky Harbor Airport all morning long and joins us with a look at how things are looking out there. Good morning, Danielle. Thank you, Danielle. Yeah. Yeah, good morning. And surprisingly, things are pretty business as usual here. Nothing major really to report. We do know that there's some delays as well as cancellations. But other than that, I mean, we're here at Terminal 4. These are the D checkpoints. We have the A just across the way from us here. And security checkpoint, everything looks really good so far this morning. No major delays as far as that. Speaking with travelers here today, yesterday, obviously causing a lot of confusion. People didn't really know what was going on. Of course, you know, waking up this morning, we're thinking that it's going to be really a circus here at Phoenix Sky Harbor. But no, it is not that. It is definitely very calm and smooth. We do see the boards over here where you can see the arrivals. And once again, specifically, this is just Terminal 4 that we're talking about here at Phoenix Sky Harbor. There are some cancellations. There are some delays, as well as for the departures. You can see a few more delays, really, than any type of cancellations that we're seeing here at Terminal 4. So once again, things are back up and running. Here at Phoenix Sky Harbor, we spoke with a few travelers out here. One couple we actually spoke to, they were on the runway yesterday, second in line to take off to Dallas-Fort Worth, and unfortunately, that didn't happen. Everybody was extremely calm. They just told us there was a stop, and they didn't know why, that all planes were stopped here at Sky Harbor. And they let us know as soon as they could, so they finally deplaned us. And, um... Then they told us what happened at the airport and we'd already been here for six hours so we didn't want to wait another six. So we changed our flight to this morning. Yeah, and that couple you just heard from there, they said that they were really, it was pretty easy to book the flight here for this morning. They even got to the airport extremely early for that flight, thinking that there was going to be mass chaos. And they were pretty pleasantly surprised this morning when they showed up here and saw that the lines weren't too bad so far. So hopefully they're through security now, making it on to their way to Dallas-Fort Worth. But they said they sat on the tarmac for about 30 minutes or so yesterday, so not too bad, all things considered. So once again, if you are heading out today, if you have a flight in the coming days, we do know that, you know, it does appear calm here. Everything is fine here this morning. But the ripple down effect really can be seen for days, for weeks, for all of these planes, these flights to get caught up and back on schedule here. So definitely the greatest word of advice would be to check ahead before coming here to Phoenix Sky Harbor. Annalisa, we'll send it back to you. All right. A very encouraging scene over there. Thank you, Danielle.