FAA Must Rethink When Upgrades Are Made After Nationwide Ground Stop: Duffy
Detailed summary
Friday’s disruption occurred as an FAA telecommunications contractor was working at a remote facility in Arkansas.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy acknowledged Sunday that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) may need to reevaluate when it conducts infrastructure upgrades after routine daytime maintenance at a remote facility triggered a nationwide ground stop that disrupted air travel across the country.
Appearing on CBS News’ Face the Nation, Duffy explained that while maintenance at major facilities is generally performed overnight, work at remote locations has historically been allowed during the day because the risk was considered low.
“Obviously, on Friday we saw no,” Duffy told moderator Margaret Brennan. “It flooded our network, and we had to take the extraordinary step of issuing a ground stop.”
He added: “We're going to have to reevaluate now when we do this work.”
The FAA said the incident resulted in approximately 12,462 flight cancellations, including 9,082 by major airlines, though the agency cautioned that not every cancellation was directly caused by the ground stop.
Friday’s disruption occurred as FAA telecommunications contractor L3Harris Technologies was working at a remote facility in El Dorado, Arkansas, replacing an aging copper communications connection with fiber.
Duffy said the copper connection could no longer be used and that the telecommunications provider had required the FAA to make the change.
“We were forced by the telecom provider to actually update that copper to fiber, and we brought in our routers and did the work,” Duffy said. “And that's when we saw the flooding of the network.”
Investigators are examining why a router at the Arkansas site began broadcasting data across the network and why a similar issue emerged in Amarillo, Texas, where similar work had been completed weeks earlier.
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