White House: Nationwide ground stop lifted

Well, good to see you guys again. Welcome to Friday the 13th, right? All right. You know, I want to make sure everybody understands that there is no connection between this and Microsoft. I know a lot of people are making that jump. This is, so far what we've seen, there is actually no I don't know. Cyber attack, we're still working through that process. Our teams are working. This is what the leadership of President Trump looks like. By the organization and the team he's put together, we're built to handle crisis like this. And that's exactly what we're doing. We're moving at an unprecedented pace as a whole of government to make sure that we are doing the public justice by making sure everybody is safe, which everybody is. We are working with With the airports, with the communities, with the cities, the states to make sure those passengers that may find themselves in need, FEMA has activated their centers to make sure that there's no medication that is being missed. If it is, we're going to have people for them to reach out to. The airport has got a direct number to reach out to us. We can provide that medication for them working through the state. Thank you very much. Right now, things seem to be... Working, as we can say, in the right direction. As you can see to my right, I have Secretary Sean Duffy, who is here to provide the update on FEMA, where we're at, and where we're going. Once Sean is completed with his update, then we will be happy to take questions from everybody. I just want to reiterate this. The public was never at danger through this process. There was never any lives at risk, there was no flights at risk, FAA was able to handle it, we did it out of an abundant of caution, but I do understand the internet traffic and where all these conspiracies start running towards, I just can't say this enough. All your loved ones are safe. We are working to resolve the issue and we hope to have operations up and going normal at some point. So with that, I'll turn it over to Secretary Duffy. Thank you, Mark Wayne, and good night to everybody. First want to thank you for your partnership and assistance. Mark Wayne, it's been great. Stephen Miller put together all of the intelligence assets of the White House. We were in multiple times talking to the president about what was happening in the airspace, complete engagement by President Trump's team. So just I want to walk through what happened today. So at 3.36 PM, we experienced instability. For our radar and our communications and our centers and our tracons across the country. So if you don't know this, at airports we have towers, the next rung out is a tracon, after that we have enroute centers. The tracons and the centers, we started to have inconsistency in the data from the radars and our communication with airplanes. And we have procedures for this. Our pilots are well trained. Our air traffic controllers are well trained. And at that point, we issued a ground stop. We had over 3,500 airplanes in the air. They all engaged and last time I looked, we had less than 400 in the airspace. As they were all coming in to safely land and we navigated it with our well known procedures that we have when these incidents happen. I'm gonna talk about where we're at now, but before I do that, when we shut down the airspace, oftentimes there are critical movements that have to take place, whether it's medevac, there's cargo operations that are moving critical medicines that save people's lives. We didn't lose all telecom, we didn't lose all radar, but that instability because of abundance of caution and making sure we keep the American flyer safe, we did the ground stop. But we were going to allow those life saving movements to still occur as well as with law enforcement as well. So what happened? Right? I've heard a lot of the rumors like Mark Wayne has. But what we have is an incredibly old air traffic control system. I think every single one of your networks have covered the president and myself talking about this for the last two years. The president for the last year has been asking Congress to fully fund A full build of a brand new air traffic control system. So we have TDM telecom. So this is analog telecom. Our switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data and they went down. And I shouldn't say they went down. They started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers. And because of that, we shut the system down. Now, I have already replaced some of those switches with President Trump. And our new IP switches did not go down. It's the old hardware that went down. And I think the question for the American people is, do you want your Congress to fund this? President Trump has asked for the money, he's asked the Congress on a bipartisan approach to say, give us the resources to build a state of the art air traffic control system. Let's not do a patchwork, a fix to a system that's critical for every single family. It's not red, it's not blue, it's not Democrat, it's not Republican, it's American. Give us the money to fix it. Now, if you look to the past administrations going back 25 years, $15 billion has been given to the FAA to fix this air traffic control system. And guess what? Barely anything was done. We had a down payment. President Trump asked for it in the one big beautiful bill of $12.5 billion. We are building in that $12.5 billion, that portion of the build will be done by the time President Trump leaves office. We are moving at a speed that has never been seen before with regard to the FAA. But that's a partial funding. I think America demands that the Congress give the rest of the resources to finish the bill. And I think the Congress at a point looked to the history of the FAA and said, we don't trust you. Well, with President Trump and what we've done, I think they do trust because what we've done with that first tranche of money. And so with a brand new state of the art system, you won't have these outages. So what you experienced today, but you can think back, many of you covered the story from a year and a half ago, we had outages in Newark, multiple outages in Newark. This is a continual problem that we have and it should be fixed. And so what we want to do, I've asked... The president's asked for $30 billion, I want $50 billion. And by the way, if you look at how much money congressman's, Peter, you've covered Congress, they waste a lot of money. What's more important than having an air traffic control system that actually works? And so the president said, you know what? Let's finish this job, new hardware, new software, new telecommunication. Many of our towers are almost 100 years old. Our air traffic controllers have leaky roofs, air conditioning that doesn't work, they're high in the air, their elevators don't work, their roofs leak. I want new towers. We should also invest in many of the airports around the country that, frankly, many of them are embarrassing. Let's get the money, let's invest so we never have to come at- 8.30 at night and have a press conference on why air travel was shut down, why we have tens of thousands of people in airports separated from their families without any knowledge of where they're going to sleep tonight. Now, you probably picked up that we've identified the problem. We've got our centers and our TRACONs operational right now. And so at 8.15 tonight, Eastern Time, we've opened up the airspace. Now, does that mean every flight is going to fly right now? It's going to be slow, right? So if you're watching, you're at an airport, check with your airline. It depends on do we have crews available or do we have pilots? And flight attendants available to fly your flight. We're going to try to move as many of those as we can tonight if we have the capacity with crews to move those flights. If not, we're going to start tomorrow morning with our airline partners moving those aircraft. But it's going to take us some time to unwind what's happened this afternoon. Finally, with general aviation, if we have aircraft that's moving, Six people, that's a lower priority. But this weekend, we have movements of aircraft that are general aviation that might have 60, 80, 100 people on those aircraft. We are gonna give those aircraft a priority. So hopefully tomorrow, we are gonna start to see far better movement. But we'll take your questions. This is an emergency. This is an emergency. I want Congress to give us emergency funding. This is bipartisan. This is American. I want $50 billion. President Trump is a builder. He's gonna build this network and deliver for the American people. But the president can't deliver for America unless the Congress delivers the money to make it happen. So with that, we're happy to take your questions, Peter. Secretary Duffy, what you're describing Routers overloaded with data that then start to show instability. That sounds like something that could be caused by a cyber attack. Can you say with 100% certainty that this was not caused by a cyber attack or a rogue AI? I'm going to give this to Mark Whiten. All right, we are, there's nothing completely certain right now. It doesn't appear that way. We are, we've activated our teams. This is what Department of Homeland Security is all about. This is why we're stood up to have a continuity of government, to bring all the resources together in an emergency like this. This is exactly what this is. This is a national emergency. We have all of our assets, be it from DHS to CISA to all of our NOCs, Then all the other components we have inside of of DHS. NSA is working with us. There is nothing that indicates it yet. Now, when we start looking at cyber threats, cyber attacks, typically some people is going to raise their hand up and say, hey, we did that. There's no chatter. We haven't seen any footprints, as you would say, or identifications of people that got into the system. It appears that this was mechanically driven However... We're still looking, so we're not going to rule that out. I want to hit back on to what Secretary Duffy said with the funding. This is a national security risk. We just saw what took place when we have vulnerabilities and we have old systems. The president has declared this a national emergency, and now we have to have... Congress act and fund it. This is vitally important that we get this system built. The president has said this, Secretary Duffy has said this multiple times. Our air traffic control system is outdated and it hasn't been a priority from Congress. And so this is what happens when Congress kicks the can down the road. But so when you say that you haven't seen footprints suggesting a cyber attack and nobody's taking credit for a cyber attack, have you seen any evidence Specifically, can you tell people who are watching? No, we have seen zero evidence that this was a cyber attack or a SI attack. So then it must be something else. What is the other thing? What caused the instability? So it's very easy. We have old switches, old routers. We use 1980s little copper lines. It's an old system that went down, and went down everywhere, it got overloaded. Right now we've opened up the airspace. We've got our centers and our TRACONs operational. It would be much, and I don't wanna rule out that we didn't have nefarious activity here. That's Mark Wayne and the cybersecurity team that works with us. We were able to We've been able to deploy fixes to reduce the overloading on our switches that we're able to bring the networks back online and our TRACONs and our centers back online. So I think our fix. Gives us a pretty good indication that it was a legacy network problem that went down. And by the way, all of the new equipment that we put in, none of that went down. This is all the old legacy equipment that's existed forever. By the way, none of your networks run on 1980 technology. You all got fiber state of the art high speed networks that cover all of your stations, but not the FAA. I think the American people deserve the same kind of network that you all use, the same kind of connectivity and speed that you all use. That's what we're asking the Congress to give us. Thank you very much. One question for each of you. Mr. Mullen, are you able to completely rule out foreign interference? And then, Mr. Duffy, you're talking about... Old systems being to blame here. The ground stop is lifted, but this is not gonna get fixed overnight. Thousands of flights have been delayed, thousands of flights have been canceled. How can you assure the American people that it is going to be safe to fly? And how long is it going to take for flights to be fully operational and back to normal? So let's talk about the cyber security. Once again, we're still looking at it. We're not ruling out anything. What it appears to be right now is as Secretary Duffy and FAA was going in and putting patches into the system, they were putting new equipment Thank you very much. and new technology. And that new equipment, new technology, just wasn't, it was overwhelming the older system, which is why Secretary Duffy made it very clear. The patchwork doesn't work. We need one complete system. We need someone to come in and build the whole system. Doing it nickel and dime it together does not work. This is what happens when that takes place. That's why the president has made it very clear. We can't do this. It has to be a complete overhaul of the system, which we estimate to be about $50 billion. However, out of abundance of caution, we are still going to do everything we can to rule it out. If that changes, we will let you know. But it doesn't appear right now that this was anything to do with technology. So to answer your question, this is not going to get done overnight. You're right. But when do you want to start it? America, when do you want to start building a brand new system? Well, you have a team with President Trump that actually is building it right now, but we don't have full funding. And so I think there's no better time than the present to actually give us the money and let us finish the build. What went down was old, right? It was the old legacy equipment, it failed. And listen, it's gonna continue to fail. But my number one job is America's safety. That is my- That is my first charge. And so if you look at what happened today, we had a failure. And what happened? We effectively and safely got aircraft out of the airspace, right? And sometimes people will complain, why did you shut the airspace down? And we just had an incident a couple months ago in New York, where that system went down as a telecom issue. We will shut the system down. I want you to fly safely. If you miss a baseball game, you miss a wedding, I care about you getting there without any harm. And so, again, this is a time you have a builder president. We can play politics. By the way, play politics all you want on all kinds of issues. That's great. And there's a lot of issues to play politics on. This is not one of those issues. This is an American issue, an American build with an American president that knows how to do it. Sir, thank you. Will this cascade into Thanksgiving travel plans for college students coming home? Do you expect to see delays, cancellations, even though we're days out? That's a great question. So I believe that it's gonna take us some time to get back to capacity and then get people who were disrupted over the course of the last eight hours. To get them back to their destination. So we're gonna have some makeup to do. I would imagine a lot of my kids are flying next Friday back from college. I imagine that's when a lot of kids are flying and everyone starts their Thanksgiving travel. Which by the way, is a very busy time for travelers. I think we're gonna be back up and operational as we come into the heat of travel during Thanksgiving. And one more, you said earlier you mentioned medical flights. Organ transplants are still being flown across the country? Yes, we don't stop those because Because it wasn't a complete outage, it was just we were getting varying degrees of our inputs from radar and from telecom. We were able to still fly those flights safely and we understand. People's lives are in basically in the hands of these flights being able to get from point A to point B. So we're allowing those to go as well as law enforcement. The tanker riverboat crashed today down in the Orleans, I mean, terrible, I'm sure you saw the video. Do you have any idea how that happened? And that tanker runs right into the side of it. What are you learning? That's the Coast Guard. Yeah, this looks like it was an engineer, major engineering defect that took place during either they hit the bridge or something caused the ripple effect. I do want to announce, though, by the grace of God, we have not lost one soul. There was 195 souls on board. All 195 souls are accounted for. or thirty-two Um, or at the hospital, uh, we're still in various conditions, but my last report was there was no, um, um, uh, critical conditions that was taking place. So just, uh, just an absolute, uh, miracle there.