Sean Duffy declines to apologize for FAA ground stop

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy declined to apologize on Sunday, November 15, for the nationwide FAA ground stop that disrupted flights across the United States two days earlier. In an interview with “Meet the Press,” he blamed decades of underinvestment in air traffic control, according to NBC News.

• Duffy said he could not apologize for the system passed on to his administration, while acknowledging the outage happened on his watch.
• He expects airlines and airports to resume normal operations by the end of Sunday or early Monday, after aircraft and crews were left out of position.
• The FAA’s investigation had not established the outage’s root cause; L3Harris said it was supporting that investigation.

Why Duffy says he will not apologize

“It happened on my watch,” Duffy told NBC News’ “Meet the Press.” He said he was moving quickly to modernize air traffic control and was proud of the work, but added: “I can’t apologize for what was passed off to us.” He said he could not blame only Republicans or Democrats, and described the problem as “30 years of a lack of investment” by previous leaders.

What officials say about the FAA network outage

At a Saturday briefing, Duffy said a contractor was replacing a copper telecommunications line with fiber at a remote FAA site when a router overwhelmed the agency’s national telecommunications network. He identified the contractor as L3Harris. The account describes a possible sequence, while officials continued investigating what went wrong.

CNBC reported that officials had cited instability in routers and networking equipment, while FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said the root cause was unknown. Bedford also said routine router replacement was separate from the FAA’s modernization funding. L3Harris said it was supporting the FAA’s investigation into the conditions that led to the November 13 ground stop, CNBC reported.

Why airlines may need time to recover

Duffy said the ground stop left planes and flight crews out of position, requiring airlines to coordinate them again. He expected operations to improve Sunday and return to normal by the end of the day or early Monday. The forecast was about recovery from the disruption; the investigation into its cause was ongoing.

The modernization request predates the outage

Duffy and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought sent Congress a letter on Thursday, November 12, seeking $30.1 billion for airport and air traffic control upgrades, NBC News reported. The request included a telecommunications backbone, updated hardware and software, control towers and airport infrastructure. At Saturday’s briefing, Duffy said, “Until I can build [the new architecture], I’m stuck with L3Harris, who owns this network.”