Travelers at DTW react to national FAA ground stop

We're going to go to Dave Kinchin. He was en route to DTW last time we spoke with him. Dave, you're inside the terminal. What is it like there? Set the scene for us. Yeah, a lot of people, a lot of crowding around here. This is the big board at the McNamara Terminal. You can see there's a lot, there's red that's been popping up. I'll call you back, okay? You can see everything that's been kind of, this is the real-time updates right now, delays, planes that have arrived at the gates, but otherwise delays, and a lot of red. This gentleman here, sir, tell me your name real quick. My name is Vern Lindquist. And tell me how you got this alert and where were you? You were just getting off a plane, is that right? I was actually getting on the plane. Getting on. And my mom, who's in assisted living, gave me a text that said, hope you're not on the plane because everything's grounded. I said, mom, quit watching the news. It's all lies. I was kind of wrong, I guess. Yeah, yeah. This is definitely a national event taking place right now. Did you get any other information from the airline or anything? I got nothing from the airline. What I've learned, I learned from my mother in assisted living. Yeah. So what do you make of all of this happening right now? I mean, the White House, there was a transportation official just talking about this at the White House right now. There's two areas of the country, they're not saying where, where they are still able to communicate with planes. They're not saying where that is, but there's a full court press on this right now in Washington as all the services are working on this. Well, listen, I'm just thankful that my brother's got a pickup truck and he's going to come get me. So otherwise, we'd be screwed. All right. Well, I appreciate your time. Absolutely. Yep. So again, if you're just joining us, this is the McNamara terminal here at DTW. Just giving you one more look at some of the flights of cancellation here in Appleton, Wisconsin. And, you know, we're going to just keep trying to work and see what people know. I hear this lady's on the phone right now. Ma'am, just tell me, I'm with Fox 2. What do you know right now? What are you hearing? What's your thoughts on all of this right now? They're not telling us anything other than Google. Like, I keep watching the Delta app, and nothing is showing. Where are you headed? I'm headed to Miami to see my daughter and grandkids. And then all of a sudden you hear about this national ground stop right now, and just a state of confusion. The flight, like, I booked it last minute like I usually do, because my grandkids, and there were 23 people on standby, like, 45 minutes ago, and there's never, you know, there was a lot of seats. Now there's no seats left on our flight. And then my daughter just called and said there's a ground stop. That's how we found out what she called. But there's no, like Delta's usually pretty good about telling us. But look, it keeps saying it's on time. Yeah, I think the airlines are probably waiting for the word from the federal government too, from the FAA. Thank you for joining us. When we Googled it, it said that they're starting to let some flights go, but there's still 4,000. I'd rather go home if I knew it was going to be delayed. Yeah, I think, yeah, well, I appreciate you talking to us. Thank you so much Yeah, absolutely. A lot of people in that situation. Rup, we'll send it back to you right now. Again, as you can see, just it's a lot of folks who don't, who are on their phones trying to figure out what's going on. They're going to get the word from either their airlines, if not the federal government first, and the airlines are certainly going to get that from the federal government. Go ahead. Go ahead, Rup. No, I imagine right now, it's an interesting situation because Dave, you have on one hand this outage because of this ATC system, but on top of that, you also have them giving an approximation as to when flights may resume, five or six hours from now. That has to be a bit confusing for people who can't figure out what is going on right now. Oh, yeah, no doubt about it. I mean, we live on our phones, and we try to get all that information together, and there's a big kind of silent space right now as far as information trickling in. And you heard that one lady there just trying to hear, you know, her app says that her plane's still on time, but clearly there's no flights going out right now. And also a critical effort to get, you know, planes that are already in the air down on the ground as quickly as possible at airports or, you know, the most appropriate locations for that. That's the whole other side of this too. So, you know, it's really much of the same out here, Rup. I mean, it's people just, they have the same questions. So we certainly want to get information out. We don't want it to get repetitive here, but it's the same situation for a lot of people trying to figure out what's going on. Sir, excuse me, sir. All right, well, yeah, so. I don't know if you want to check with your pilot contact, because maybe they might have more info. We'll keep looking here. Give us a live picture, Dave, of the airport as we let you gather some sound. Keep the live picture up, if you would. Sure. Let's get on the phone. Brent Yaks is a cyber expert. He's a cyber risk expert. Brent, you're on the phone with us live on Fox 2. Thanks for joining us here. Thanks for having me, Rick. What is it that you make of what you're hearing? You're looking at live pictures of Metro Airport right now. Jessica Dupak, myself, trying to make sense of this, along with all of the thousands of people watching right now. There are layers of this ATC system. The ATC system, apparently down, that stands for the air traffic control, right? Is that right? That's correct. The air traffic control system is down. The FAA told everyone to shut down because they have communication failure through most of the major airports. What about what's happened this week? You had the Microsoft outage yesterday. You had some big movement in the AI world, maybe too early to make those links or not. What's your take on that? Well, nobody's come out with enough information yet. You know, I don't see the linkage between Microsoft. What we don't know now is, is there anything to do with cyber? Is there anything to do with hacking? We don't know why these systems went down or why the backups didn't come on. Because they're supposed to all have backup systems, which is really telling that none of those came up, you know, when this happened. So we're still just waiting on information now, trying to figure out what's going on and collecting info as we see it. And we've been talking for years about the antiquated system that air traffic controllers use. I just talked to an FAA expert who says they still use floppy disks in some cases. Could it be as simple as something as just antiquated equipment? I mean, you hope not because these systems are supposed to have, like I said, backups and failover. In case of something like this, I mean, this is a major system, right? These are flights down, right? So there's supposed to be systems in place. Even if it's old and antiquated, it shouldn't fail like this. So we don't know if this was a cascading failure, if it was a single point of failure. We're just not sure yet what caused this to go down. And we're trying to get information as it comes out. Brent, I do want to ask you about the elephant in the room. Of course, we all know that there's a conflict going on with Iran right now. We also know they have a very sophisticated system in which they've We've been known to attack different pieces of infrastructure when it comes to cyber attacks. That can't be ruled out and clearly Mark Wayne Mullen didn't rule that out either. No, we haven't. And, you know, we're hoping it's nothing like that. We're hoping they're not that sophisticated. We're hoping that they can't get into some of these major systems like this. But again, it's so early. We haven't been able to rule anything out. We haven't been able to rule out a cyber attack. So, you know, we need the FAA, we need the air traffic control system to start providing information so we can really gather what to do next. And give us a little bit of a scope of what this means. You're talking about a nationwide ground stop, hasn't happened since 9-11. What does that signify to you, just in terms of scope? Well, yeah, like I said, there's only been a few times, really, that I can remember where it was of a magnitude like this, where they did a full ground stop. Of course, 9-11, there was also some little blips in 2023. But, yeah, we normally, you know. We should never see something like this. We all wanna feel much more safe when we're dealing with air traffic control and these systems are built to handle failures. And what we're seeing right now is maybe the systems aren't built as well as we hope they are. Now, keep in mind, this does not mean there's navigation issues, that does not mean there's issues in the plane. It just means the communication system for the air traffic controllers had an issue. When you talk about the fact that planes are still able to land at this hour, yet There's an outage and a stoppage right now, kind of block that out for us, what does that look like? Yeah, so I mean, all of the planes can communicate with each other as well, they do have the ability to manually land, they do have the ability to obviously see and land, the traffic control system. guides everything simultaneously and they coordinate with all the other air traffic control systems that are out there. So we want to stop and get all the planes out of the air that we could immediately to free up all the room for all the ones that are flying to land safely, have no traffic patterns to deal with, then just be able to get home as quickly and safely as And some of the experts are saying that this could all be buttoned up by 10, 11 o'clock. Even Debbie Dingell, Representative Debbie Dingell says, you know, about a seven hour span here. There is. Does that, should we read into that as being something good news that they already kind of know a timeline? It is good that they predict, you know, when they're going to come back. I think what's what's more concerning to me really is that, you know, we don't really have a clear picture of what happened. And it sounds like there are some pieces of information out there. If they can project when it's going to be back, they do know what was going on, but they haven't released it publicly yet. So we don't know what it was. So until I hear what really caused this and what really happened, I'm not sure how much better I feel yet. I wanna ask you about the words, obviously words matter and you heard the FAA essentially say that this is all because of extraordinary circumstances. What do you make of that? Well, you know, and it's the same really thing that we hear from Microsoft, right? I mean, their whole system went down earlier this week and now the, you know, or the ATC system went down for extraordinary circumstances. And what really bugs me when you hear words like that is that if it's extraordinary, then we shouldn't be hearing about these things weekly. And, you know, of course, these are two different companies. These are two different scenarios completely, and they're not related at all from what we can tell. But as the public, we have to have trust in these systems. And if we have something back to back to back, you're going to lose trust. So, yes, it's extraordinary. We should not see it again. Hopefully they should fix this and update their infrastructure because of this. But it really does give you sort of an uneasy feeling when something like this happens.