In a press briefing Saturday morning, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said air traffic control communications are back to "full operations," while offering his fullest explanation yet of what caused the nationwide FAA ground stop on Friday.
Duffy said a contractor with L3Harris was performing routine maintenance at a remote FAA location to switch decades-old copper telecommunications lines over to fiber.
"What we’re working to determine was whether we had incompetence, meaning was it user error…from L3 Harris, or did they install a faulty router?" Duffy said.
The replacement router began flooding other routers across the air traffic control network with thousands of connection attempts, overwhelming the system.
Duffy said this interfered with air traffic controllers’ ability to communicate with airplanes and disrupted radar feeds.
FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said officials isolated the defective piece of equipment responsible for the outage. It took roughly 45 minutes from the start of the disruptions to pinpoint the cause, which officials said has now been resolved.
"What we had were random reports from different facilities of certain frequencies that were going in and out, and requiring them to switch between primaries and backup switching," Bedford said. "Now, if that had been a single facility, we would have just worked through it. But when we saw it go to two, three, ten, 17 facilities, that’s when we started to realize there was something much larger going on here."
"Since we couldn’t explain it quickly, that’s when we went to the national ground stop," Bedford added.
Bedford also repeatedly told reporters that no systems "went dark" or were "fully lost" on Friday.
There was no evidence of a cyber attack and "zero evidence of anything AI related," Bedford said, adding that FAA’s safety system are "operating as safe today as it was two weeks ago."
Posted by James Cirrone
Congress must act to upgrade aging FAA telecommunications system, Duffy says
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy reiterated his demand Saturday that Congress allocate more funds to upgrading the decades-old FAA telecommunications infrastructure, known as the FTI system.
The FTI system, which is managed by L3Harris, connects air traffic control facilities across the U.S. and suffered a major outage on Friday, which was what prompted the FAA to issue a nationwide ground stop.
"Every agency within the government for better than two decades has flagged this FTI system as a critical weakness. So, this is probably one of the worst kept secrets in government that this FTI system needs to be replaced," FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford told reporters.
In order to prevent further malfunctions, Duffy said he has asked Congress to provide $30 billion toward the modernization of air travel, including new telecom architecture, new software, upgraded runways, and new control towers to replace 50- to 75-year-old ones.
But to cover all airspace infrastructure needs, Duffy has said the full bill would cost some $50 billion. Duffy said he’d send a full, detailed funding request to Congress by Monday.
Posted by James Cirrone
Source:
Diem ‘Richard’ Nguyen
Liên Minh Bảo Hiến Mỹ Gốc Việt
Vietnamese American Conservative Alliance (VACA)
https://freedom-vaca.org/vaca-blog-tieng-viet-nam/
https://freedom-vaca.org/vaca-main-blog-english-articles/