US flight outage live updates: FAA lifts nationwide ground stop; Trump officials suggest new tech overwhelmed old equipment
Sean Duffy says ‘it’s going to take us some time to unwind what’s happened’ but also points finger at Congress, claiming lack of funding for systems upgrades Sign up for the Breaking News US email In other tech-related news, the Microsoft outage is still going. The longest in the company’s history. My colleagues are covering the latest and how it’s affecting millions and pretty much every industry … As I noted earlier, the calls for Howard Lutnick to appear before lawmakers on Capitol Hill have been answered. Continue reading...
Briefing reporters at the White House on Friday, Sean Duffy , the US transportation secretary, and Markwayne Mullin , the homeland security secretary, used the nationwide outage to press for more funding to overhaul the nation’s air-traffic-control system.
Both secretaries appeared to suggest that the cause of Friday’s outage was that older technology became overwhelmed with data after new technology was introduced. The FAA announced three days ago that a new air traffic management tool, known as Smart, was activated at all 22 air route traffic control centers in the US.
“The president for the last year has been asking Congress to fully fund a full build of a brand new air traffic control system,” Duffy said. “So we have TDM, telecom, so 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, from those routers. And because of that, we shut the system down.”
“What it appears to be right now is”, Mullin said later, “as secretary Duffy and FAA was going in and putting patches into the system, they were putting new equipment and new technology and that new equipment, new technology just wasn’t- it was overwhelming the older system, which is why secretary Duffy made it very clear the patchwork doesn’t work. We need one complete system. We need someone to come in and build the whole system. Doing it- nickel and dime-ing it together does not work. This is what happens when that takes place. ”
Duffy denied the new Smart system, which incorporates artificial intelligence, had caused the problem.
