FAA ground stop lifted: Trump administration seeks $50 billion for air traffic control modernization

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 en route 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. 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 So I'm going to respond. 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 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.