Expert weighs in on nationwide FAA ground stop

We're still covering this nationwide ground stop. Again, this took place, this all happened around 2 o'clock Arizona time. And so far, no sign that this is lifting. Anytime soon. And of course, there will be a cascading effect of getting everything back on track. Yeah, there's a lot to cover with all this and the impacts. We want to go right now to a guest, Michael O'Donnell, president and founder of O'Donnell Aerospace Consulting, a seasoned executive in this industry over 40 years. You're the right guy to talk to. Appreciate you taking some time. I want to ask you perspective wise. What we're dealing with right now, I mean, this is a monumental moment, and it seems like there's a reason why it's taking so long to get lifted. Yes, thank you for having me and I appreciate the questions as well. Everybody has the same question, what happened and how long is this going to take? And the answers are right now not too clear. And I know that the FAA will most likely come without a statement at some point saying, hey, here's what we found, here's what we're working on. But first I got to find out exactly what happened. I think they're still trying to figure that part out. But safety is priority, and so they'll make sure that the aircraft that are airborne right now will get on the ground safely. They won't let other aircraft take off because they're just trying to eliminate that problem dealing with more aircraft with these radio problems or communication problems. Yeah, I mean, Secretary Mullen, he spoke a short time ago and he kind of reassured the public there is there's no threat. He kind of was saying your family members, your folks that are in the air are safe right now. So they must be confident in some way that that. This is fixable. There's no danger. And this was done out of an abundance of caution. But how do we read into that? What what could this be? What kind of telecommunications error? Because obviously planes are still landing. So there's still some they can communicate with those those aircraft. Right. You know, this has happened before. We've had a notice to airmen systems fail. These are systems that the FAA uses to pass on critical flight safety information. And those systems have failed in the past before. We've had nationwide ground stops because of it. So there are backups to those systems to a degree. But this one's a little different. This is the telecommunications and the radio. A portion of the communication portion of it, right? So aircraft need three things to navigate. They need good communications, they need good surveillance, and they need good navigation equipment. If you take one of those three away, then there becomes an issue. And so the FAA obviously said, we're going to eliminate... Putting more aircraft into the system because we don't have confidence that the communications are occurring where they're supposed to occur. Now there are backups to that as well, but we can ask questions later as to why the backups didn't work. And how widespread was it enough that they decided to shut down the entire airspace to fix it? We'll find out that information hopefully very soon. Michael, thank you so much. Appreciate the perspective from you here. There's going to be a lot to continue to track fallout from this for sure. Appreciate it, Michael. Thanks for your time.