The nation’s longest ground stoppage since 9/11 came to a stop shortly after 8 p.m. EST on Friday, more than four hours after the Federal Aviation Administration halted all U.S. flights due to “extraordinary circumstances.”
Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin held a press conference after lifting the stoppage, blaming “overloaded” and “outdated” systems for the ordeal.
“We have old, old switches, old routers,” Duffy said, blaming Congress for not providing funding for newer equipment. “We use 1980s little copper lines. It’s an old system that went down, and went down everywhere. It got overloaded.”
Asked if they could say with “100% certainty” that the incident was not tied to a cyberattack or issues with artificial intelligence, Mullin said it “doesn’t appear that way.”
He also affirmed Americans were “never in danger through this process.”
News of the ground stoppage broke around 1 p.m EST, with Duffy citing a “communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers” and the FAA pointing to a “temporary telecommunications outage.”
In the hours leading up to Duffy and Mullin’s press conference, information about what led to the ground stop or when flights would resume remained scant. Flight-tracking site FlightAware reports that more than 10,000 flights were delayed.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin took questions from reporters shortly after flights halted. Asked if the FAA had lost communication with planes in the sky, he said it hadn’t ― though he didn’t seem confident in his answer.
“No, no, it’s just at a different level,” he said. “The clarity — as my understanding, so I’m not trying to get ahead of myself on this one — my understanding is that we can still communicate. It’s just that it’s at a different level and the clarity that we can get to. But there’s redundancy in most communications. So, as you can see, there’s still planes landing. And so there’s still communications going on.”
While it’s still unclear what caused the communication issue, the FAA announced this week that it was expanding the use of an $875 million artificial intelligence tool, SMART, to “assist in managing air traffic across the entire national airspace system,” Ars Technica reported Thursday.
Asked whether the new AI tool had anything to do with the grounding of flights, Mullin admonished the reporter for not using the term “SI,” for “super intelligence.”
“We call it SI around here, remember? SI.” Mullin said. “You just can’t rule out anything at this point. We’re going through that process, and we’re going to find out what happened.”
At the start of the ground stoppage, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) called on the White House to provide more information.
“The amount of people that are going to be grounded across this country is going to cause major interruptions and chaos,” Garcia said on MS NOW. “And so, I think the sooner that the Transportation Department and certainly, quite frankly, the White House explains what’s going on, the better, because this is pretty, pretty significant.”
President Trump has said little about the incident. About two hours after the ground stop began, his first public remarks came in the form of a Truth Social post about reviving the entertainment industry. He also posted about a boat crash in the Mississippi River.
More than an hour after that, Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy said he’d spoken to Trump.
“He says it does not seem like this is a cyberattack or AI or anything like that,” Doocy said on air Friday.
“He said instead that it 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,” Doocy continued.
Asked by a reporter why Americans hadn’t heard from Trump, Duffy said Friday evening that he doesn’t “run the president’s comms” but that both he and Mullin were in “constant communication” with the president throughout the stoppage.