WASHINGTON DC, Nov 14 – Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy confirmed that the airspace has reopened.
“We’ve got our centres and our trachons operational right now, and so at 8:15 tonight Eastern time, we’ve opened up the airspace.”
But flight movement depends on resources, he says.
“It’s going to take us some time to unwind what’s happened this afternoon.”
Duffy explains the outage will cause a ripple effect, and they are looking at flights this weekend to try to get things back on track, so the problem will persist for a few days.
Zero evidence’ of cyber attack,
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin quashed claims that the outage today has anything to do with the Microsoft outage many experienced yesterday.
Mullin says the administration is moving at an unprecedented pace to make sure everyone is safe and helping passengers who are stranded.
He adds that the public was never at risk, “no one was ever at risk”.
‘Old legacy equipment that failed’
Duffy, who is asking for $50b from Congress to build new air traffic control systems, is explaining how a patchwork fix overwhelmed existing systems.
He says that none of the new equipment that they’ve rolled out recently is to blame.
“What went down was old. It was old legacy equipment that failed,” he says.
Duffy says that they were able to roll out fixes to “reduce the overloading on our switches that were able to bring the networks back online”.
He says those fixes appeared to help signal that there wasn’t an attack, but that it was existing equipment and network failures.
Incident Timeline
Speaking during a news briefing at the White House, Duffy gave reporters a timeline as to how the incident unfolded.
He says that at 3:36 pm local time, “we experienced instability for our radar and our communications and our centres” across the country. Once inconsistent data from routers started registering, the FAA issued a nation-wide ground stop.
“What we have is an incredibly old air traffic control system,” Duffy told reporters, explaining that the routers got “overloaded with data”, which led to “inconsistency” in the data received from those routers.
He went on to say that Congress needs to “give us the resources to build a state-of-the-art air traffic system”, and he needs $50bn to revamp the system.
Thanksgiving Holiday Travel
The transport secretary has been asked whether this outage will affect holiday travel.
Duffy says that it is going to “take us some time to get back to capacity”, but thinks things will be “back up and operational as we come in to the heat of travel during Thanksgiving”.
The Thanksgiving travel period, which begins in less than two weeks, is usually one of the busiest times of the year for air travel in the US.
Duffy has added that larger plane travel is being prioritised over “smaller movements” to try and get things back up and running as quickly as possible.
