How to prevent future air traffic control tech outages

Former FBI special agent and former Navy pilot Richard Kolko joins us now live again this morning. Richard, I appreciate your time. Absolutely, Todd. Glad to be here. I'm glad to be here a little better today. Yeah, I mean, things are obviously faring better. Airlines are working to get back on track. Delta Airlines is based here. Obviously, when you have such a long outage where you have to ground planes, crews are going to be out of place, planes are going to be out of place, and so they have to work to get everyone back to where they need to be. And so, obviously, the cleanup, essentially, is underway right now. But what should people understand about what we saw on Friday? Well, clearly, we're over the hump of getting aircraft back on time. The number of cancellations and delays today is significantly less than yesterday. And so hopefully by the opening of business tomorrow, Monday morning, we should be back up and running at regular speed as we approach Thanksgiving travel season, which is a crazy time, as everybody knows, especially in Atlanta. I love the busiest airport in the country. This was just, you know, they're still saying it was a snafu and changing from old-fashioned copper wires to a new... New cables, not sure exactly what happened. FBI is still conducting its investigation to see if there was indeed any cyber intrusions. So far, the answer is no, but they're going to wait until they can definitively 100% say no, and that's a good thing. I'm not sure what to expect next. They need to make these improvements. The secretary was asked an interesting question at his press conference yesterday. Why did you decide to do this on a Friday afternoon, very busy time, versus two in the morning when there are less airplanes in the air? Frankly, he didn't have an answer for that. And I imagine as they continue to make these changes, you'll see the work schedule change so that if something does go wrong, they'll have a better handle on it in time to repair it. So I cover transportation a lot for us here at Fox 5 Atlanta. And the thing that stood out to me is the lack of a backup system to be able to keep planes in the air. I mean, to grind to a halt our nation's airspace while they waited for the system to come back online. Obviously, the planes that were already in the air could stay in the air. That was perfectly fine. But they just weren't allowing anyone to take off to not have something in place to be able to allow. The planes to take off because that not just affects the airlines, which is their businesses, but it also affects all the customers who are relying on these flights. And on a Friday afternoon, many people are trying to get home from work. Absolutely. I think they've got it back up and they went to that backup. And as we've heard the secretary saying, as we know from what we witnessed, everybody landed safely. So that's important. And you just showed that flight aware map, which I thought was great. And you can see how quick the airspace clears out. But that is not an answer to say we're going to shut down the airspace if there is a technical glitch again. And everybody has said there's likely to be a a technical glitch again. I think what's important for people to recognize is Fixing this system is not simple. It's not like just running down to the store, buying a new laptop, bringing it home and plugging it into your internet at the house. They haven't even designed this system. The secretary said, give me $50 billion. If Congress decides to write him a check tomorrow morning, which isn't very likely, they'll have to design this system. test it, build it, implement it. It'll take years and years to get some new ATC, which is air traffic control system, into place and make sure that these kind of problems don't happen in the future. So I think we're in for a bumpy ride for the foreseeable future. And there's no saying that something like this couldn't happen again. I mean, the good news here is we do have a very safe. air traffic system in our country. I mean, it is exceedingly rare to have a plane crash where people get killed. And so that is why they ended up pulling. Essentially, the departures, they didn't want to put anyone at risk because the safety is at the forefront of what they do. But obviously, if you're trying to modernize the system, there is going to, as you mentioned, there's going to be some bumps because I'm sure as they put some of these systems online, you could see things intermittently come on. I mean, yeah. How do you modernize a system that is decades old while also making sure that you're doing this safely? That's going to be the hard part, I think. I don't think the new system is designed yet. I think there's people with a drawing board that what they hope it will look like and what they hope it will be capable of, but I don't think it exists yet. So technology-wise, we've got a ways to go. And having been around the government, knowing how the government contracts and purchases and things, it can take a while. Unfortunately, it's not something that's going to get fixed overnight. It's something that should have been fixed by now. They've known this problem was coming for decades. And you can blame any president or any Congress you want, but all of them have just kicked the can down the road. Or down the runway, waiting for some sort of solution to happen here and they didn't do it. But maybe this will be the catalyst that gets them working on this to get a fix in place or at least started. But like I said, you and I can have this conversation two years from now and it's still not going to be a new system that we're looking at. Yeah, I guess if you ask anyone, this was probably a good time. It happened two weeks before Thanksgiving and not. Next week or the week after when people are trying to get to their holiday destinations, but nevertheless, it still impacted so many people. Just about 45 minutes ago, we spoke to a woman who lives in Nashville, who was connecting here in Atlanta. And unfortunately, she has taken Uber home from the Atlanta airport to Nashville. And there's just stories like that across the country where people, they were desperate to get home on a Friday because there was just unclear. It was just going to be unclear when they were actually going to get home. How does the FAA, how do airlines reassure people that when you book a flight, you're gonna be able to get to where you need to go? Boy, that's a million dollar question or probably a multimillion dollar question. A million and a half people fly every day at least in the United States. And on Friday, they lost basically half a day, so whatever, five or 750,000 people. And those seats don't magically appear on the airplanes the next day. So that's why it's taken a couple of days to get things sorted out. Not only get the airplanes and the air crews in the right place, but trying to get people rebooked on these flights. So, you know, this all happened Friday. On Saturday, there was still everybody that wanted to go flying that already had their tickets. So not simple. Airlines are not going to be able to make any guarantees that this is fixed or not going to happen again. It really does fall on the shoulders of the FAA, Department of Transportation and U.S. Congress to resolve this. So they're the one. So airlines will certainly be pushing them to make those changes. Passengers will certainly be pushing them to make those changes. And it's all very, very important that we do see something happen in the future. But just as, you know, like you said, you cover transportation a lot. You know, I fly around a lot, too. You know, take that early flight in the day. That gives you some options, you know. You know, have a way to. You know, I don't think Uber to Nashville is a good solution, but try and think of a backup plan when you can. You know, sometimes the train might work better. Sometimes driving might work better on the shorter flights. But having a solution or a resolution falls on all of us because hoping or expecting the airlines to fix this for us just isn't going to happen. And of course, it happened on a clear blue sky day here in Atlanta, pretty much. Thank you very much. That wasn't even the issue. Normally it's the weather that impacts the travel here out of Hartsfield-Jackson. This time it was just the technology. And I think I saw Flighty, that app that tracks your flights and things like that, posted that the number of cancellations and delays actually surpassed CrowdStrike a couple years ago, which heavily impacted Delta Airlines for, I think, a week pretty much. Yeah, when you couldn't make any reservations for them or use anything online for Delta. I remember that CrowdStrike thing was a disaster for quite a while. Forget about these. It seems like they happen so often. I mean, before Friday afternoon, all we were talking about was the Microsoft Outlook failure. And that kind of disappeared off the radar, per se, pretty quickly when this happened. And it just seems we've bounced from one thing to the next. And technology far outpaces the ability to... Keep up with it, replace the systems, and stay up to date, not only in the aviation world, but just on your computer and all the Internet-based applications. So it's probably just a frustration that we're going to have, and people got to get used to it and have a backup plan for themselves on how to handle this. Richard, I really appreciate your time this morning and breaking all this down and kind of having this conversation about what happened. And now, obviously, the fix is going to be modernization. And just unfortunately, it's going to be the costs that Congress and the federal government have to figure out to be able to give the air traffic controllers the technology they need to upgrade a system that is decades old. The good news is if you're going to be a transportation reporter, you've got many years of. Of job security ahead, because this is going to be an issue for quite a while. So you'll be able to follow along how quickly they decide to make some of these changes. And I'm hopeful that when the new Congress gets in in January, that this is one of the things that they'll address, because they really, really need to get started down this road, because it is not a quick fix. Richard, I really appreciate your time this morning and joining us on a Sunday morning. I'm sure you have a lot better things you'd like to be doing, but I appreciate your expertise. Happy to be here, Tyler. Have a good day. You too.