FULL: White House briefing on nationwide ground stop

Well, good to see you guys again. Welcome to Friday the 13th, 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 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 a 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 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. So right now, things seem to be... We're 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 abundance 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, I want to thank you for your partnership and assistance. Mark Wayne has 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 p.m. 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 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 going to 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. 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 Congressmen... 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? 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 going to give those aircraft a priority. So hopefully tomorrow, we are going to 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 going to 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 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 Wayne. 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 were stood up to have the 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 DOW to CISA to all of our NOCs. Then all the other components we have inside 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. The Press So when you say that you haven't seen footprints suggesting a cyber attack, and nobody is 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. So, so, uh, what was here? 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 want to 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 deploy fixes to reduce the overloading on our switches. Then 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 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 going to 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 cybersecurity. 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 ...patches into the system. They were putting new equipment 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 going to continue to fail. But my number one job is America's safety. That is my, that is, that is, that is. 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 some we just had an incident a couple a couple of 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 bill, 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 going to 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 going to 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 going to 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 basically in the hands of these flights being able to get from point A to point B. So we were allowing those to go as well as law enforcement. The tanker riverboat crash today down in New 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 We're still in various conditions, but my last report was there was no critical conditions that were taking place. So just an absolute miracle there. But once again, not connected at all. That was something that took place. Mr. Secretary, Mr. Secretary, Mr. Secretary, Mr. Secretary. In the run-up, Mr. Secretary, you were having war against Iran. Was there any input at all? In the run-up, Mr. Secretary, you were having a war against Iran. Was there any input at all? Beyond this incident, that there were Iranian elements or any other elements who may be plotting cyber attacks? MR. No, we're not seeing that. We're not seeing that at all. Yes. Thank you so much. Thank you guys for your coordination about this emergency. Speaking of college, a huge industry that relies on travel again is college football. Have you guys been in communication with these universities, and do you plan to implement any sort of coordination there? MR. Yeah. So as I mentioned, we're going to allow for general aviation, those larger movements to take place as a priority. So, as I mentioned, we're going to allow for general aviation, those larger movements to take place as a priority. Smaller movements will take a lower priority. And so if you talk about football teams moving, many of those are on charters, and there's a lot of individuals on those charter planes. So I would encourage those football teams to reach out to the FAA to schedule their flight times and make sure they can move to make sure we have games going off tomorrow. Mr. Secretary. Yes, sir. Thank you, Cameron Arkham from Santa Paula. Has there been any communication with the major commercial airlines? And then can you just clarify what rights do passengers have right now? I know you mentioned FEMA, but what other rights do they have? Yeah, so we are in communication with all of our airline partners. We're making them aware as soon as we can with what the issues are, right, because they're also concerned. Was this cyber? What took place where we had a ground stop and when Mark Wayne and our airlines are navigating the passengers who are stranded in airports but we work fully with them as we come back online and what planes we can move as quickly as possible to get people to their final destinations and this is one of those scenarios where this is not the fault of the airline. This is, again, I'm happy to blame the airlines, I'm happy to blame the weather, but I'm also happy to take the blame when it's with the FAA and air traffic control. And this is a legacy system problem that took place tonight, and we have to handle it accordingly. Thank you, sir. Just describe how this manifested in the air today. Were airplanes still able to communicate with air traffic controllers? How did it specifically impact that, and separately, do you have any sort of an estimate at this point on the economic impact of this stoppage and where that goes from here? So, we had intermittent communication and intermittent radar. And which is why we then shut the airspace down. So it wasn't a complete blackout in communication or radar. So we were able to keep some of those communications going. But when you have issues and you can't immediately communicate and immediately see where aircraft are at, that's a risk that we're unwilling to tolerate. In regard to economic consequences. Of what happened today, I think it underscores how important aviation is to our economy. We haven't done a calculation. We've been I got off and I was on the airplane, an airplane from Dallas when this happened, hence my attire and haven't gone to change. So I apologize for wearing a jacket and jeans with you. There'll be time to do an economic analysis, but this is critical for the American economy, which is why the Congress, I'm going to say it a million times, the Congress has to give the resources to the president so we can finish this bill. That means there were times, just to be clear to follow up, that means there were times when airplanes and air traffic controllers were not communicating with each other at all. So that can happen, yes. And what happened, we have emergency procedures in place. In this case, if this happens... Pilots know what to do, and air traffic controllers know what to do, and whether it's systems on airplanes that are still operational, it's still communication, though not consistent, we're able to navigate the airspace, and as you saw today, we systematically but slowly brought down 3,500 plus aircraft safely across the national airspace, which I want to give credit to the pilots and to our air traffic controllers who are very well trained. Are you saying that it was the FAA patching a system that caused this outage? Is that something that's happening constantly? I want to clarify that. This is our old TDM analog system. That got overloaded with data and started to experience these issues and it was in our TRACONS and our centers throughout the NAS. Now we do have some in our TRACONS and centers that have been upgraded to digital, to IP. Those did not experience these issues, which underscores the point it's important that we're able to finish this work with additional resources. We need to be confident that this vulnerability won't be an issue again in the coming weeks if what today took place. This is a great question. So, listen, I can't build things if I don't have money. This is a great question that you ask. How can America be confident? Well, we do everything. We have the busiest airspace in the world, bar none. We have the safest airspace in the world, bar none. No one competes with us on safety or complication of the airspace. But if you ask the question, what should we do? Well, we should talk to our senators and our members of Congress to say, We don't deserve this, America. This is the greatest country, by the way, with the greatest president. Let's give the money to fix this very real problem. And this is not the first time. We had this happen in New York when we had global leaders were flying in for the UN. We had a similar issue. We had an issue in Newark. It happened twice. How many times does this have to happen before Congress gives the money to fix it? The President has been in office for almost two years now, sir. So why hasn't this been a bigger priority for the President? Republicans control both chambers of Congress and still do. And the NBC. NBC. So maybe you haven't covered the 100-plus press conferences that I've done on this issue that have been led by the President, but I know Fox has. Peter's carried the story. I know many of you have covered the story about the President's ask and my ask to get the money. Right. And so I identify, I identify, well, because the Congress has to give it to us. Right. And you need it. You need it. Well, oftentimes it's a great point. Oftentimes you need a bipartisan vote. Right. So I did get partial funding through one big, beautiful bill. I got twelve and a half billion. And with that money, we are we are we are spending it and spending it well. But the Congress at the time knew that that was not going to be enough. By the way, this is bipartisan, but on that bill, I didn't have Democrats that voted for it. We now have an opportunity in an emergency funding bill before the end of the year to give the money. And I think the question should be from NBC to every member. Do you support actually modernizing, making a state-of-the-art air traffic control system? And it's going to take us some time. I can't snap my fingers and build a network overnight. But do you want us to build this for America? Every member of Congress should say yes, but every American, I guarantee you, would tell those members, yes, give President Trump, give Duffy the money, let them finish this job so we don't have to do a press conference at 8.30 at night ever again. And if you can't do it, why are you building the new system? Is it safe to fly? How do we know this isn't going to happen again tomorrow when you bring in new passengers? So this is the safest system in the world. And by the way, it hasn't been done in the past because it is complicated. This is, I don't want to lie to anybody, this is, what we're doing is hard. And it hasn't happened in the past because it is hard. But I'll tell you, by doing nothing, you inject way more risk into the system, right? To use 1980s technology, 1990s software, to use 1970s radar that we don't make parts for anymore, to have an old network, an old network configuration from the 80s. Versus re-networking the air traffic control system through the FAA. I believe that should be a priority. And our number one mission when we do any of this is safety. But if you do nothing, the system doesn't get more safe. It gets less safe. And so I would say, America, Congress. Let's make this system more safe. Let's continue to lead. We led the world in aviation. We led it in the jet age. We've led in space. Let's continue to lead with a state-of-the-art, a system that no one has that's the best in the world, but that takes cash. Let's do it again. With your knowledge of the old system and what kind of ins and outs there, why wasn't the agency prepared for some kind of catastrophic failure like it's on today? Well I can't anticipate every catastrophic failure that will happen with a TDM network, with an analog network. So shouldn't there have been a backup plan in place in case this network failed? You knew it was an old system you were trying to replace to keep you old in the air? So I didn't anticipate that we would have a An outage like this. We've had small outages that I've mentioned previously. We didn't think we would have this kind of outage. We did. And what I would tell you is the systems that were deployed kept everybody safe. Everyone landed. We're able to review what went wrong and then reboot the system and go. But you will have more of these. You will have more of them unless. The American people in the Congress tell us to build, and I can't wait for that. You say this is a priority for President Trump. Why have we not heard from him at all on this issue since it happened? Oh, well, the two of us have talked to him. I've talked to him on the phone. I've talked to him in the Oval. So has Mark Wayne. Thank you, Wayne. Oh, I don't run the president's comms. I just know that Mark Wayne and I are going to come out and talk to you about it. But I know he's fully engaged because he has communicated with the both of us. Multiple times, from the point that it happened to moments before I came out, I was in constant communication. Mark Wayne and I were in the Oval with him, which, by the way, I appreciate his leadership. And what's just unique about the president is he loves aviation. He loves the airspace, which is why he has been so engaged on this. He understands it very well. And he's been frustrated from my first, before I actually was sworn in, he was talking about about how old the system is, how Past administrations had failed in how he wants to fix the air traffic control system in America and deliver the best in the world. And it takes a president's leadership, like President Trump, to make sure we can ask the Congress and get the money and give the deliverables. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Secretary. I'm curious. I don't think we have clarity yet. What was different about today specifically? The system has been in place for a long time. Why did today the system go out? And can you give more clarity? You're saying this will happen again. Should Americans feel safe when they fly if these outages are still possible? In what kind of vintage you'll have it happen again, I don't know, right? Is this exact thing going to happen again? I don't know that this exact scenario will happen, but I did have New York a couple months ago. I had Newark a year and a half ago. Let's go. So, we're still working on the details of what went wrong today. Okay. I'll be happy to give you more information when we have it. I don't want to give you the wrong information. Our team is working overtime trying to navigate what happened here, what was the cause. And how do we prevent it in the future should similar situations arise? So as I mentioned, this is all the old legacy equipment. All of the new equipment that's been deployed did not go down. Our smart system, which is a system that we have a feed for the whole airspace, that's going to help us better manage trajectories of airplanes and better manage weather so we can, one, drive safety in the airspace and drive efficiency in the airspace. But that smart system isn't plugged in to STARS and ERAM. It's not, this is completely disconnected and I love that some people have said this would be the root cause. By the way, if it was, I would tell you that, but this is not even plugged in. What this does is gives information from the airspace to a human being and gives them a prompt on how they could better navigate weather or trajectories. Then the human being will actually decide to accept or deny that prompt. So we're not even... So there was no possible way SMART would have impacted what happened today. You said today that there was no one in any danger. I'm curious, for people who are frustrated right now about the fact that their flight's been delayed or canceled, why was there a ground stop put in place for five hours if no one was in any danger? Well, let me explain that one very easy. No one was in danger because of the procedures we put in place. The system went down. We reacted the way that we were trained to react. And everybody came together. President Trump immediately had people in his office. We were communicating. Secretary Duffy, the FAA, took immediate actions that they had put in place to assure everybody was safe. And that's why you saw we had, as Secretary Duffy had said, we had over 3,000 flights in the air. We had a ground stoppage, and they were all able to land safely, even with the communication problems. And I just can't speak enough about President Trump's leadership. This is what President Trump does. He puts leaders in place and he allows them to lead. To even ask, you know, why is the president not talking? It's because he's allowed Secretary Duffy and us to go out there and explain to you what took place. President Trump trusts his leadership, and that's why we really lean in towards his leadership. And when Secretary Duffy said he's the greatest president we've had, you've never had a builder and a leader like President Trump lead this nation, have a vision, and put the team together. Thank you guys so much. Appreciate it.