The Federal Aviation Administration instituted a rare nationwide ground stop for all airports for more than four hours Friday — a move that thrust the nation’s air travel into chaos with thousands of canceled flights and stranded travelers.
At a White House press briefing Friday night, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blamed old technology that became overloaded for “instability” and “inconsistency” in radar and communications affecting the air traffic control system.
Asked what was different about the system on Friday, Duffy said “we’re still working on the details of what went wrong today.”
Duffy called on Congress to provide billions more in funding to modernize critical equipment, calling the situation an “emergency” and said he didn’t anticipate an outage like the one that sparked the ground stop.
Pressed by reporters whether the outage was the result of a cyberattack, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said there was nothing to indicate that so far but they were not ruling anything out. “There’s nothing completely certain right now,” he said, adding, “It doesn’t appear that way.”
Mullin repeatedly tried to assure the public that this wasn’t “another 9/11” and that “the public was never at danger through this process.”
In the hours after the FAA ordered the ground stop, thousands of flights were canceled, and officials warned it would take time for airports to return to normal.
“It’s going to take us some time to unwind what’s happened this afternoon,” Duffy said adding that “hopefully tomorrow we are going to start to see far better movement.”
Duffy said he believes things will be “back up and operational” heading into Thanksgiving travel. (CNN)