Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Saturday that a nationwide ground stop halting flights across the United States was caused by seemingly routine maintenance work.
Duffy said that during “routine maintenance,” copper wire at a remote location was being upgraded to fiber optic cable by L3Harris, a longtime contractor for the Federal Aviation Administration. After the upgrade, a router overloaded a critical communication system, leading to the ground stop.
“It’s pretty straightforward work that we were doing yesterday at, again, a very remote location,” Duffy said during a Saturday press conference that appeared to have technical issues of its own. “What we’re working to determine was whether we had incompetence — meaning, was it user error or installator error from L3Harris? Or did they install a faulty router?”
The FAA’s acting CTO Rebecca Guy added, “When we started to see the occurrence where our network was having instability, we started to look at what was the cause. And as such, we saw two places that were actually pinging our network at a very high rate — a thousand connections over every four to five seconds.”
Guy said the FAA disabled “both of those, right away and were able to stabilize our network,” and is now performing a root cause analysis.
