FAA underwent AI upgrade in last 2 days

Thank you so much. Reporting live at SFO. It is the second busiest airport in California. It's the busiest airport here in the Bay. And if you look statewide, it's number two behind only L.A.X. Let's talk to somebody who knows what it's like to be in the middle of a crisis looking from the federal level. We'll welcome Mark Nouveau. He's a former FEMA coordinator joining us again here to give us some good insight on what's happening. We are about an hour, two hours and 40 minutes deep into this. Mark Nouveau, as a former FEMA coordinator, what do you think is happening behind the scenes at the FAA and other parts of the administration? I would think a little bit of scrambling, don't you? I think they're a little bit concerned about what's taking place. Now, keep in mind, remember the FAA upgraded their system over the last two days, right? We went to an AI system in 22 of these FAA regional centers. That's not to say they're connected, but the occurrence to it, coincidence seems to be interesting. Do you have any idea as to any progress that's been made? We've been reporting sort of here and there, a couple, you know, a flight taking off, that sort of thing. But really that 8 p.m. Sort of possible beginning for things to really open up, just so you know, Ali and I have been looking for updates from the FAA, and we've not been getting any updates, which in a story of this magnitude feels strange and is rare. And in fact, along those lines, I was surprised that we heard from the Department of Homeland Security before we heard from the FAA, which you would think was the person directly involved with this ground stop. Yeah, I'm with you, Ali. I would think the same thing, right? Sean Duffy did come on, the head of the FAA, did talk a little bit about it. But a standard MO for something like this is to be able to have news conferences, media updates, so that the public understands what's going on, especially as widespread as this is. Now, what we're also hearing from your reporters is on the West Coast, there seems to be some progress made flying aircraft towards Hawaii, Now, keep in mind, we talked about this earlier. Of the 22 FAA centers that are involved here, one of them, the Oakland Center, based in Fremont, is what covers the western United States. So that area that's up and running, it appears, is operated on the west coast, so there seems to be communications capability for them to get flights out. Yeah, what can we read into that, the fact that there are some flights leaving? From the West Coast. Is that a sign that things are improving system-wide or just that there's an improvement in that particular region? Yeah, conjecture on my part. I'm gonna be optimist here and say that's the process. Earlier they talked about going, I think the representative from FSFO, Doug was talking about they're going center by center testing to make sure all 22 of them are up and operating. I'm hoping that's what's taking place, that this one center happens to be up and operating. And so that allows the rest of them to come online right after that. What might the fallout of this be? Yeah, well, you know, what they're talking about is it's going to take, you know, hours to get everybody back online, back into the system, the flights back to normal. I would say it's more like days, you know, it's going to take them a period of time. The longer this goes on, the harder it is to get the system back up and operating. You've got those flights that headed to a specific destination, which is the good news, meaning those planes have landed where they were destined to go when they took off. Versus during 9-11 and some of the terrorist incidents, we saw those planes having to land specifically the closest airport. That creates even more chaos. So in this case, we do know the aircraft are getting to their destination. Nothing's taken off except on the west coast appears. So I like to think we're going in the right direction. You know, hindsight is always 20-20, but is there anything that you would have advised the federal government or the FAA to do differently in this whole process? And it's not resolved yet, but so far. Yeah, it's hard for me to say, right? I'm coming into an area of the FAA that I'm not overly familiar with. I would just say from the standard of disaster emergency management, one of the key things you want to do is make sure you keep people updated. And people seem to, you know, that brings calm, right? We know what's transpiring. We have a sense, especially as we saw some of the, you know, the flyers, the people, the passengers were heading to destinations for, you know. One of them, I think you interviewed, it was a celebration of life. Some of them are heading to cruise. Well, those are critical times for people, and they're trying to figure out, if I can't get out tonight, what's my secondary plan? Frank Malico trying to come from San Diego to be able to report to work tomorrow, like KTVU. So they're trying to make alternative plans. The more we can update people, it keeps calm for the public, and that's important not just for the sake of Do you think this is something we should hear from the president on? I don't know, he's got emissaries that are out there talking for him. If it were something that was probably terrorist related, I would think you would hear something from him without question. This seems to be an operational issue that they're trying to work through. Okay. All right. I do feel like we and others are just sort of hungry for the latest information and sometimes even just a calming voice is a nice thing to have. It's been good to have you on. I know we've leaned on you very heavily here, but given your role with the federal government here as a former FEMA coordinator, I'm not surprised at all that you were able to help us out in a time like this, Mark. Thank you for your comments, Garcia. Thank you. All right, we'll go ahead and let Mark Navo go here. But the story is far from over. Again, you brought us the breaking news. We had it right around 1 o'clock on Fox Local San Francisco. We're now coming up on 3:45. So, you know, we're, of course, still going to have all of our regular afternoon and evening newscasts. But we're going to sign off here in just a minute.