What caused the nationwide FAA ground stop? Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy explains

Those of you who are aviation reporters have heard me talk about a decades-old air traffic control system. It's not just old equipment, we have an incredibly old telecommunication system. And so here's what we believe happened yesterday. In at least one of our remote FAA locations, a contractor was doing routine maintenance to switch telecommunication lines from old copper wire, and they were bringing it over fiber. That contractor that does the work for us is L3 Harris. They're our legacy provider. They've been working for the FAA for over 20 years. And the network that we use at the FAA to control the airspace, L3 Harris actually owns that network. Now, the work happening was due to the age of the copper wire that we were replacing. It was such an old wire that it was being discontinued meaning that line was going to get shut down so we had to switch it over from old copper we had to bring it over to fiber going from TDM to IP or from analog to digital. I want to be clear, this work has been happening in America for decades. Virtually every single institution in America has gone from copper to fiber. From analog to digital I just maybe the FAA is the last one to be doing this work because the investments haven't been made but this is not complicated it's pretty straightforward work that we were doing yesterday at again a very remote location so what we're working to determine was whether we had incompetence meaning was it user error or installator error from L3 Harris Or, did they install a faulty router? We haven't determined what the fault was, was it the router or were they not doing great work for us at L3 Harris. Either through contractor error or a faulty piece of equipment, that router that was being replaced as we switched from copper to fiber, it started flooding other routers in our air traffic control system. So specifically, we had over 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds. And what that did was it gave us issues with our communication with airplanes and it also caused some disruption with our radar feeds. And when we see that, your safety is paramount. We shut down the airspace and we do it safely. We get you on the ground, And then we work on isolating the problem and then opening the airspace back up, which is what we did yesterday. And as we get more information, we'll give this to you.