Air chaos in the United States: a router failure grounded flights and Trump blamed the Biden administration

WASHINGTON.– The chaos in US air traffic was continuing this Sunday for a third consecutive day, with thousands of flights canceled or delayed across the country, while authorities anticipated that the normalization of operations could extend until Monday. At the same time, Donald Trump's administration was trying to determine the causes of a technical failure that forced the suspension of takeoffs nationwide for nearly five hours on Friday and once again put the state of American air traffic control infrastructure under scrutiny. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy requested $50 billion from Congress to modernize air traffic control systems, above the $30 billion he had previously requested, arguing that the $12.5 billion approved last year is not enough to renew all the technology or incorporate new airspace management systems. President Donald Trump backed the request on Sunday and attributed the infrastructure's deterioration to the administration of his predecessor, Joe Biden, whose tenure he called a "disaster." In a message on Truth Social, he demanded that Congress approve the funds all at once rather than gradually: "Congress must give its approval," he wrote. Trump blamed Biden for the air chaosThe request for more funding met resistance from Democratic lawmakers, who questioned the need to expand the budget without a detailed explanation of how the already allocated resources were being used. Senator Chris Van Hollen argued that the government must justify any additional spending, while Representatives Rick Larsen and André Carson also expressed their reservations. Duffy, for his part, avoided guaranteeing that a similar collapse will not happen again and said that first it is necessary to determine the origin of the failure. As Trump did, he refused to take responsibility for the deficiencies inherited from previous administrations and defended the flight suspension as a necessary measure to protect passengers. "We are going to find out what the root cause was and then we will move forward," he said. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin during a press conference in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House, in WashingtonAlex Brandon - APAccording to the specialized site FlightAware, as of Sunday more than 1,600 flights had been canceled and another 3,600 were experiencing delays. The situation came on top of the more than 6,400 cancellations and 8,000 delays on Saturday, after Friday's disruption triggered a domino effect in the operations of the major airlines. Among the most affected this Sunday were JetBlue, with 27% of its flights canceled, and American Airlines, with 13%. Southwest, United Airlines and Delta recorded cancellations of between 3% and 5% of their operations. Duffy predicted that service would begin to return to normal during the day, although he warned that a full normalization might only be reached on Monday, when planes, crews and passengers were back in the places planned on their itineraries. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered the longest interruption of US air traffic since the September 11, 2001 attacks, although a smaller-scale shutdown had already occurred in 2023 due to a computer failure. An update that triggered the collapseWhile airlines tried to rearrange their operations, authorities were advancing in the investigation into the origin of the failure. The main hypothesis points to a series of problems during modernization work on the FAA's communications infrastructure, particularly the installation and replacement of routers at two remote stations in Arkansas and Texas. As Duffy explained, the problem began with the replacement of a router at a facility in El Dorado, Arkansas, where a contractor for the agency was working to replace old copper wiring with higher-speed fiber optic connections. The intervention, initially considered a routine upgrade that could be carried out without affecting the rest of the network, ended up triggering a chain reaction. The new device reportedly caused communication problems with another router recently replaced in Amarillo, Texas. Rebecca Guy, the FAA's chief technology officer, explained that the latter began transmitting an abnormally high volume of data, which overloaded equipment at other air traffic control centers across the country and affected the communication systems used to coordinate flights and radar signals. Authorities disconnected the equipment involved, but by then the instability had already spread and had compromised the operation of other systems. The agency reported on Sunday that it had disabled the functionality of the routers at the origin and applied the same measure to about 60 similar devices distributed across the air traffic control network, as a precaution to prevent new overloads. The FAA's acting chief technology officer, Rebecca Guy, speaks alongside FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford during a press conference at the Department of Transportation headquarters building in WashingtonAARON SCHWARTZ - AFPHowever, it has still not been established what caused the initial failure or why the Amarillo equipment presented problems on Friday, when no upgrade work was being carried out there. Investigators are analyzing whether there was a hardware failure or an error during maintenance work carried out by L3Harris, the contractor responsible for much of the FAA's telecommunications infrastructure. Duffy ruled out that there are signs of a cyberattack or a deliberate attempt at sabotage. He also defended the worker who carried out the installation in Arkansas, whom he described as a US Army veteran and a patriot. "We don't believe anyone tried to sabotage the network during the installation," he said, although he acknowledged that they still do not know the root cause of the problem. The episode reignited concerns about the vulnerability of an air traffic control system that suffers from technological obsolescence problems, equipment deficiencies and a shortage of several thousand controllers. According to Duffy, some of the routers involved were purchased in 2001 and were already obsolete by 2006. In certain facilities, moreover, the telecommunications infrastructure still depends on wiring installed during the 1980s. Doubts about the FAA's ability to carry out its modernization program are also not new. In September, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), an independent congressional watchdog, warned of the risks of the agency prioritizing the speed of upgrades over costs and possible service disruptions. It also criticized the lack of coordination of the schedules of more than 11,000 projects and the absence of estimates on the cost of maintaining existing technology. Agencies Reuters and AFP and The New York Times