WASHINGTON DC, Nov 14 – Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy confirmed that the airspace has reopened.
“We’ve got our centres and our trachons operational right now, and so at 8:15 tonight Eastern time, we’ve opened up the airspace.”
But flight movement depends on resources, he says.
“It’s going to take us some time to unwind what’s happened this afternoon.”
Duffy explains the outage will cause a ripple effect, and they are looking at flights this weekend to try to get things back on track, so the problem will persist for a few days.
Zero evidence’ of cyber attack,
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin quashed claims that the outage today has anything to do with the Microsoft outage many experienced yesterday.
Mullin says the administration is moving at an unprecedented pace to make sure everyone is safe and helping passengers who are stranded.
He adds that the public was never at risk, “no one was ever at risk”.
‘Old legacy equipment that failed’
Duffy, who is asking for $50b from Congress to build new air traffic control systems, is explaining how a patchwork fix overwhelmed existing systems.
He says that none of the new equipment that they’ve rolled out recently is to blame.
“What went down was old. It was old legacy equipment that failed,” he says.
