FAA blames Friday's ground stop on 'equipment issue' during telecoms network upgrade

Friday's nationwide ground stop was declared after an error occurred while a contractor was updating an old Federal Aviation Administration telecommunication, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Saturday.L3Harris, a long time contractor for the Federal Aviation Administration, was doing routine maintenance in at least one of FAA's remote location changing copper wire to fiber, he said.Duffy said the routers in these facilities were manufactured in 2001.

These updates have been happening in American institutions for decades, Duffy said."Virtually every single institution in America has gone from copper to fiber, from analog to digital," Duffy said."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."L3Harris did not immediately respond to NPR's request for comment.Duffy said the FAA is still investigating the exact error that started flooding other routers in the air traffic control system."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, installator error from L3Harris, or did they install a faulty router?"Bryan Bedford, the FAA administrator, who joined Duffy at the briefing said there was no evidence of anything nefarious happening or AI-related issues.Tens of thousands of passengers across the U.S.

are still stranded Saturday after a rare ground stop halted all flights.The chaos is expected to linger for days.The aviation system is back online and slowly returning to normal Saturday morning, but delays and cancellations will continue after yesterday's nationwide ground stop, Duffy said in the press briefing Saturday."Based on everything that we're hearing from our airline partners, they believe that they'll be able to have full schedule integrity by the close of business on Sunday," Bedford said.Duffy told reporters Friday night: "I think ...