L3Harris, contractor that revamped Trump’s Qatar-gifted jet, questioned by Sean Duffy amid FAA outage

Detailed summary

US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has blamed contractor L3Harris, the same firm working on Trump’s Qatar jet, for Friday’s FAA ground stop.

L3Harris Technologies is facing scrutiny after US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy questioned whether the contractor's mistake or faulty equipment caused Friday's nationwide FAA outage. The company had also worked with the US government on modifying a Qatar-gifted jet that could become President Donald Trump's new Air Force One.

US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on Saturday that investigators are checking whether contractor “incompetence” or a faulty router caused Friday’s air traffic control outage. The outage led to a rare nationwide ground stop that lasted about four hours.

Duffy said the failure happened during a network upgrade from copper to fiber wiring. A router that was being replaced began flooding other routers in the system, as per ANI.

“So what we’re working to determine was whether we had incompetence, meaning was it user error, installer error from L3Harris, or did they install a faulty router? We haven’t determined what the fault was,” Duffy told reporters. “Was it the router or were they not doing great work for us at L3Harris? Either through contractor error or a faulty piece of equipment, that router that was being replaced as we switch from copper to fiber started flooding other routers in our air traffic control system.”

Duffy ruled out a cyberattack. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford also backed this. “We see zero evidence of anything nefarious, and zero evidence of anything AI-related,” Bedford said. He added that the FAA is still checking whether the failure came from “faulty installation,” “faulty configuration,” or faulty router hardware.

Also read: Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy explains what caused FAA nationwide ground stop: ‘Contractor error or faulty equipment’

L3Harris is not new to the headlines. According to CNBC, in a report from May 1, 2025, the US was working with L3Harris Technologies to modify a used Qatari government jumbo jet.

As per CNBC, this came after President Donald Trump showed frustration over delays in…

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