While the US Federal Aviation Administration has now lifted the nationwide ground stop imposed on airports just before 4pm Eastern Time, the question of what caused the communications outage that paralyzed the air-traffic control system remains to be answered.
On social media, Democrats on the House homeland security committee responded to comments from Markwayne Mullin, the head of homeland security, in which he seemed to suggest that patches to the system introduced by the FAA had caused the outage, by writing:
You brought the nation’s skies to a standstill. If you think Congressional Democrats will let you bury how this happened, you are sorely mistaken. Preserve all documents and emails. Oversight is coming.
As Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, acknowledged, the outage, which lasted more than 4 hours, had caused chaos and disruptions at airports that will take days to repair.
As those disruptions ripple through the global aviation system, we will continue to track the impact of Friday’s outage, and look for answers as to what, exactly, went wrong.
Sean Duffy, the US transportation secretary, and Markwayne Mullin, the head of homeland security, just concluded their briefing on the hours-long communications outage that led to chaos at US airports on Friday.
Both men peppered their remarks with lavish praise for Donald Trump, who was curiously quiet during the crisis that lasted for more than four hours. Neither of them offered a coherent explanation of what, exactly, had gone wrong – although they did seem to suggest that it was related to the installation of new technology in an antiquated system which caused older routers to be “overloaded with data” and fail.
“This is what the leadership of President Trump looks like,” Mullin began. “We’re built to handle crisis like this.”
Duffy then praised not just the president, but also his new chief of staff. “Stephen Miller put together all of the intelligence assets of the White House,” the former Fox News host and reality TV star said. “We were in multiple times talking to the president about what was happening in the airspace – complete engagement by President Trump’s team.”
“I want Congress to give us emergency funding,” Duffy said later. “I want $50bn. President Trump is a builder. He is going to build this network, and deliver for the American people.”
After one reporter asked why Trump was silent throughout the crisis, Mullin heaped still more praise on the president before calling the news conference to an end.
“I just can’t speak enough about President Trump’s leadership. This is what President Trump does: he puts leaders in place, and he allows them to lead,” Mullin said. “He’s the greatest president we’ve had, you’ve never had a builder and a leader like President Trump lead this nation, have a vision and put the put the team together. Thank you guys so much.”
Briefing reporters at the White House on Friday, Sean Duffy, the US transportation secretary, and Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, used the nationwide outage to press for more funding to overhaul the nation’s air-traffic-control system.
Both secretaries appeared to suggest that the cause of Friday’s outage was that older technology became overwhelmed with data after new technology was introduced. The FAA announced three days ago that a new air traffic management tool, known as Smart, was activated at all 22 air route traffic control centers in the US.
“The president for the last year has been asking Congress to fully fund a full build of a brand new air traffic control system,” Duffy said. “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, from those routers. And because of that, we shut the system down.”
“What it appears to be right now is”, Mullin said later, “as secretary Duffy and FAA was going in and putting patches into the system, they were putting new equipment and new technology and that new equipment, new technology just wasn’t- it was overwhelming the older system, which is why secretary Duffy made it very clear the patchwork doesn’t work. We need one complete system. We need someone to come in and build the whole system. Doing it- nickel and dime-ing it together does not work. This is what happens when that takes place.”
Duffy denied the new Smart system, which incorporates artificial intelligence, had caused the problem.
Markwayne Mullin, the US homeland security secretary, just told reporters at a briefing on the FAA outage that brought US aviation to a standpoint, “we’ve seen zero evidence that this was a cyber-attack.”
“Now, when we start looking at cyber threats, cyber-attacks, typically some people are going to raise their hand up and say, ‘hey, we did that. There’s no chatter. We haven’t seen any footprints, as you would say, or, identifications of people that got into the system,” Mullin added. “It appears that this was mechanically driven.”
Speaking in the White House briefing room, Sean Duffy, the former Fox News host now serving as US transportation secretary, just said that the federal government has “identified the problem” that brought down the US air traffic control system on Friday and the system “is operational right now”.
“So at 8.15 tonight, Eastern Time, we’ve opened up the airspace,” Duffy said. “But it’s going to take us some time to unwind what’s happened this afternoon.”
The nationwide ground stop on departures from US airports has been lifted, the US Federal Aviation Administration said in an advisory on its website Friday.
Sean Duffy, the US transportation secretary is now speaking at a press briefing in the White House, and began by praising Donald Trump, but did not immediately announce that the ground stop was lifted.
“This is what the leadership of President Trump looks like,” Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary just said at the start of a briefing on the crisis at US airports.
Ronald Reagan Washington National is no longer accepting diverted aircraft, the FAA says.
Earlier on Friday, at least 600 flights were diverted during the nationwide groundstop, to airports including Reagan Washington, Chicago O’Hare, Denver international, and Dallas Fort Worth international.
While Donald Trump has spent hours out of sight during the crisis that paralyzed America’s airports on Friday, Fox News reports that the president told its White House correspondent, Peter Doocy, that the vast telecommunications outage does not seem like a cyber-attack.
“I did just talk to President Trump on the phone, and this is going to be the first information that we have directly from the president that you’re about to hear,” Doocy told Laura Ingraham, a pro-Trump opinion host. “He says it does not seem like this is a cyber attack or I or anything like that.
“He said there’s nobody taking credit, which would be common if somebody did execute a huge cyber attack like this on critical infrastructure,” the Fox correspondent added, “but that he would let us know and the team would let us know if that is something that happened”.
According to Doocy, Trump “said instead, this seems to be a situation where there’s a bunch of old broken stuff in the infrastructure that the FAA relies on to keep planes in the sky”.
Ingraham, who is normally a booster of Trump, expressed some indignation that his White House had not yet briefed the public on the crisis. Although Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, is Ingraham’s former Fox News colleague, she as openly critical of his absence.
“Is there any sense, Peter, that there will be a press conference to keep the public aware and reassured?” Ingraham asked. “I know we have this, a few comments here and there, and it’s nice to see that people are returning to the White House, but it seems to me that with so many people flying on a daily basis and still 400-plus flights in the air, that the American people want answers and they want them, they want them soon. Because this is not only a huge inconvenience, it frightens people.”
We are standing by for the start of a briefing, the first of the day, from the US transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, on the crisis that halted all departures from US airports for hours on Friday.
Once the briefing begins, we will bring you updates.
Less than an hour after announcing that flights to Hawaii from the US west coast would resume, following the nationwide ground stop ordered by the FAA, Hawaii’s department of transportation posted on social media: “All west coast flights have been halted due to debris from SpaceX launch.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
