U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy attributed the air chaos that caused delays and the cancellation of more than 9,000 flights on Friday to a failure by L3Harris, the contractor for air traffic control communications services, and a possibly defective router.
"We are working to determine whether it was incompetence, in the sense of a user error... by L3Harris, or whether they installed a defective router," Duffy said at a press conference.
The replacement router flooded other devices on the air traffic control network with thousands of connection attempts, causing a system collapse. Air traffic controllers were left unable to communicate with aircraft or receive radar data.
The company was carrying out routine maintenance at a remote Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) facility to replace decades-old copper lines with fiber lines.
Duffy stated that air traffic control communications are fully operational, which has not prevented 4,363 flight cancellations from already being counted on Saturday.
Random reports
Meanwhile, FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said the device responsible for the incident has already been isolated, identified about 45 minutes after the first anomalies were detected.
"Random reports came in of d…
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World"We are working to determine whether it was incompetence, in the sense of a user error... by L3Harris or whether they installed a defective router," said Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. Miami International Airport. GIORGIO VIERA CommentsU.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blamed a failure by the air traffic communications services contractor L3Harris and a possibly defective router as the causes of the air chaos that led to delays and the cancellation of more than 9,000 flights on Friday."We are working to determine whether it was incompetence, in the sense of a user error... by L3Harris or whether they installed a defective router," Duffy said at a press conference. The replacement router flooded other devices on the air traffic control network with thousands of connection attempts, causing a system collapse. Air traffic controllers lost the ability to communicate with aircraft and to receive radar data. The company was carrying out routine maintenance work at a remote Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) location to replace decades-old copper lines with fiber lines. Duffy said that air traffic control communications are fully operational, which has not prevented 4,363 flight cancellations from already being counted on Saturday. Random reportsMeanwhile, FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said the device responsible for the incident has already been isolated, identified about 45 minutes after the first anomalies were detected."Random reports came in from different facilities regarding frequencies that were coming in and cutting out, so they were forced to switch between the primary and backup systems," Bedford said. "If it had been a single source we would have gotten through it, but when we saw that there were two, three, ten, 17 sources we began to realize that something much bigger was happening," he added. Bedford emphasized that there is no evidence that the incident was a cyberattack or anything related to AI, and stated that the FAA's safety system is just as safe now as it was two weeks ago. More on:United StatesDean DuffyAirlinesL3Harris