Transportation secretary blames ‘routine’ equipment upgrade for grounding flights nationwide
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Saturday that a nationwide ground stop halting flights across the United States was caused by seemingly routine maintenance work.
Duffy said that during “routine maintenance,” copper wire at a remote location was being upgraded to fiber optic cable by L3Harris, a longtime contractor for the Federal Aviation Administration. After the upgrade, a router overloaded a critical communication system, leading to the ground stop.
“It’s pretty straightforward work that we were doing yesterday at, again, a very remote location,” Duffy said during a Saturday press conference that appeared to have technical issues of its own. “What we’re working to determine was whether we had incompetence — meaning, was it user error or installator error from L3Harris? Or did they install a faulty router?”
The FAA’s acting CTO Rebecca Guy added, “When we started to see the occurrence where our network was having instability, we...
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