US Flight Halt Lifted, Duffy Warns of More Outages
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MENAFNThe agency imposed the halt earlier Friday evening after what Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy called a “communication issue.” Thousands of flights across the country were disrupted before the order was rescinded.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told a White House news conference that the public was never in danger during the incident.
“I just want to reiterate this: the public was never at danger through this process,” Mullin told reporters.
“There was no flights at risk. FAA was able to handle it. We did it out of an abundance of caution,” he added.
Pressed on whether a cyberattack was behind the outage, Mullin said the investigation was ongoing.
“We’re still looking at it. We’re not ruling out anything,” he said.
Mullin offered a preliminary explanation, saying new technology may have overloaded legacy infrastructure during system upgrades.
“What it appears to be right now is, 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 technology was overwhelming the older system,” he said.
‘An emergency’
Duffy called the episode “an emergency” and said no one could foresee “every catastrophic failure” in the country’s aging air traffic control network. He acknowledged that smaller outages had happened before, but said he had not anticipated one of this magnitude.
He cautioned that more breakdowns would follow without major investment, and he urged Congress and the public to back a rebuild of the system.
“You will have more of them unless the American people and the Congress tell us to build,” he said.
Duffy said the equipment that failed was “old legacy equipment” and warned that “it’s going to continue to fail.” He called for a “complete overhaul of the system,” which he put at roughly $50 billion.
“President Trump is a builder,” Duffy said, adding that the president cannot deliver the overhaul without funding from Congress.
New Orleans cruise ship incident unrelated
Mullin also addressed a separate Friday incident in which a tanker struck a cruise ship on the Mississippi River in New Orleans. He said that collision and the flight disruption were “not connected at all.”
“All 195 souls are accounted for. 32 are at the hospital,” Mullin said, noting that none of those hospitalized were in critical condition.
He called the outcome “a miracle.”
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