Duffy criticizes FAA telecommunications provider L3Harris for mishap that led to ground stop

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy pointed his frustration at the nationwide ground stop Friday night at telecommunications provider L3Harris, claiming he is “stuck” with the company until funding requests are approved for other companies to step in for upgrades.Duffy held a press conference on Saturday at the Department of Transportation and said the halt in flights was due to a mishap during which an L3Harris contractor was switching telecommunications lines from copper wire to fiber optic cable.“The work happening was due to the age of the copper wire that we were replacing. It was such an old wire that it was being discontinued, meaning that line was going to get shut down, so we had to switch it over from old copper,” Duffy said. When the contractor installed the new router, the new technology appeared to overload the air traffic control system, leading officials to call for the grounding of all flights.“We had over 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds, and what that did was give us issues with our communication with airplanes, and it also caused some disruption with our radar feeds,” Duffy said.Federal Aviation Administration administrator Bryan Bedford later said the fiber installation error did not cause a blackout in the FAA Telecommunications Infrastructure.“What we had were random reports from different facilities of certain frequencies that were going in and out, and requiring them to switch between primaries and backup switching,” Bedford said. “Now, if that had been a single facility, we would have just worked through it. But when we saw it go to two, three, 10, 17 facilities, that’s when we started to realize there was something much larger going on here. And since we couldn’t explain it quickly, that’s when we went to the national ground stop.”Now, Duffy said investigators are working to determine if the fault is on the L3Harris contractor or the equipment itself.“What we’re working to determine was whether we had incompetence, meaning was it user error or installation error from L3Harris, or did they install a faulty router?” Duffy said. “We haven’t determined what the fault was.”L3Harris is the major technology integrator and managed-service provider for the FAA and has been the sole provider for over 20 years. Duffy later said additional funding would allow the FAA to move on from L3Harris, but for now that is not the case.“With our new architecture, with the money that we’re requesting, we will work with the greatest telecom companies in the world, which will be AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen,” he said. “They’re all working with us on the new architecture. But in the meantime, until I can build that, I’m stuck with L3 Harris, who owns this network.”Duffy said “we don’t believe” the error was the result of a cyberattack. Bedford also said there is no indication that artificial intelligence was involved in the incident.“This was an FAA system that didn’t meet the moment,” he said. “Our contractor didn’t meet the moment, or the equipment didn’t meet the moment, and caused the outages. I’ve been talking about this for almost two years, and I’ve been asking Congress for money.”Congress already approved $12.5 billion for air traffic control modernization through Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, but Duffy has since said the initial investment was not enough. President Donald Trump previously requested $30 billion in funding for the modernization effort, though Duffy upped his ask Friday to $50 billion to complete the overhaul.While there is more work to be done and additional money to be funded, Duffy emphasized that the DOT is already utilizing its current finances to bring telecommunications systems up to date. He explained that 69% of copper communication wires have been updated with fiber, among several other modernization efforts.“We can’t continue on technology of the [1980s],” Duffy said. “I mean, we spend over $200 million a year in obsolescence fees. We have to pay to use these old copper wires. We have to get off of them. They’re less reliable. So we have to make the transition, and we’re making the transition not because we want to spend money. We’re making the transition because it’s safer and it’s more resilient.”FAA’S MODERNIZATION PUSH FACES RENEWED SCRUTINY AFTER NATIONWIDE OUTAGE: WHAT TO KNOWAs for flight operations for the rest of the weekend, Bedford said flights should resume to normal by Sunday, but thousands of flights will be canceled on Saturday.“We do anticipate somewhere between four and 5,000 of the 41,000 flights that are scheduled today likely will cancel, so we will still have delays and cancellations today,” Bedford said. “But that will set us up for a full recovery tomorrow. And based on everything that we’re hearing from our airline partners, they believe that they’ll be able to have full schedule integrity by the close of business on Sunday.”