What to know about the rare nationwide ground stop issued by the FAA
1. What caused this? The FAA lifted the ground stop at 8.15pm ET Friday. In a White House briefing, Markwayne Mullin, homeland security secretary, and
1. What caused this? The FAA lifted the ground stop at 8.15pm ET Friday. In a White House briefing, Markwayne Mullin, homeland security secretary, and Sean Duffy, the US transportation secretary, 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. 2. How did the old technology cause this? “What it appears to be right now is”, Mullin said, “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. 3. How do we know this wasn’t a cyber-attack? Mullin said at the briefing: “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.” 4. How many flights were affected?
There have been 10,543 flight delays within, into, or out of the US so far, according to the website FlightAware, and 3,580 cancellations. Duffy said that more than 3,500 airplanes were in the air when the ground stop was issued. 5. What is a ground stop? A ground-stop order by the FAA requires that aircraft remain on the ground and bars them from taking off. Planes already in the air are usually allowed to remain in the air. The FAA has more than 14,000 air traffic controllers who handle the more than 44,000 flights that take off from airports across the US each day, according to FAA data. 6. What is the government doing to ensure this doesn’t happen again? Duffy and Mullin used Friday night’s briefing as a chance to plead for funding from Congress.
“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. “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.” 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. Last year, Congress approved $12.5bn to fix the FAA’s ageing communications system, and on Friday the FAA and White House asked Congress for another $30.1bn to address other issues.
The BriefWire