US Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Administrator Bryan Bedford held a press conference in Washington to share the latest information on the normalization of the operation in the US airspace after the departures of planes were stopped across the country.
In his statements regarding the longest take-off suspension since September 11, 2001, which stopped the takeoffs of planes across the country for more than 4 hours on Friday, Transportation Chairman Sean Duffy blamed L3Harris Technologies, the contractor company that operates the FAA's communication infrastructure, for what happened.
"WE HAVE NOT YET DETERMINED WHAT THE PROBLEM IS"
Duffy said the outage began when the FAA was switching telecommunications lines from copper cables to fiber at a remote facility. Duffy stated that the contractor company in question has served the FAA for more than 20 years and said, "What we are trying to determine now is whether there was negligence. In other words, was there a usage or installation error caused by L3Harris, or did they install a faulty router? We have not yet determined what the problem was."
Duffy said, "The router that was replaced when switching from copper to fiber began to overwhelm other routers in our air traffic control system with excessive connection traffic due to contractor error or faulty equipment. There were more than a thousand connection attempts every 4 to 5 seconds. This caused problems in our communication with the planes. It also caused some disruptions in the flow of radar data. When we see such a situation, our priority is your safety. We close the airspace and do it safely. We land the planes, then try to isolate the problem from the system and try to isolate the problem from the air." "We will try to reopen the field. We did this yesterday," he said.
US Transportation Secretary Duffy said that they did not think that the outage was caused by a cyber attack or an attack from another country. The minister, who attributed the outage to the lack of investment for years, requested additional resources from the US Congress for the modernization of the air traffic control system.
FAA CHAIRMAN BEDFORD: "THERE WILL BE DELAYS AND CANCELLATIONS TODAY"
FAA President Bryan Bedford, who started his speech by apologizing to the American people, said, "The flights of tens of thousands of Americans were disrupted yesterday. I want you to know that we did this to remain vigilant."
Arguing that the measures were taken for the right reasons, Bedford said, "Some instabilities began to appear in the system. We could not determine the reason for this for approximately 45 minutes. Therefore, we stopped the departures at around 15.45 yesterday (23.45 Turkish lira)."
Bedford said, "We predict that 4 to 5 thousand of the 41 thousand flights planned today will probably be canceled. Therefore, there will be delays and cancellations today as well. However, we expect the companies' flight schedules to return to normal by the end of business on Sunday."
Bedford said that there is no evidence that the problem is related to artificial intelligence.
