“INCREDIBLY OLD SYSTEM!” Duffy Exposes FAA’s Aging Infrastructure and Congress’s Funding Dispute

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 first charge. And so if you look at what happened today, we had a failure. 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 Seeing 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 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? 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. Um, and it. 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 Congress spends, 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. Thank you. 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 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.