“I’ve spoken with 60 air traffic controllers tonight about what Sean Duffy said at the White House today,” said one journalist. “None of them are buying what he said.”
Air traffic controllers are rejecting US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s explanation for Friday’s nationwide flight ground stop, raising questions about the Trump administration’s account of a communications failure that disrupted air travel across the United States, affecting an estimated 1.5 million travelers.
Washington Examiner homeland security reporter Anna Giaritelli told CNN’s Laura Coates during a Friday night interview that she’d spoken with 60 air traffic controllers about the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ground stop, which was just the third to ever occur.
“None of them are buying what he said,” Giaritelli said. “The controllers were saying, ‘We don’t buy that this is actually what’s happening, the reason that Sean Duffy is saying this has happened.’”
So what really happened? It sounds like it’s what we all suspected and it’s the rollout of the AI.
Duffy threw around several technical terms in the press conference, but never pinpointed the actual problem. As a telecom professional, nobody swaps out routers and switches in the middle of the day. New hardware goes in ahead of an overnight migration, or old gear gets decommissioned and someone pulls the live equipment by mistake. Based on what the article describes, this looks like a stunt to shake loose more money without oversight.
Yeah, I’ve been a tech turned network engineer in the telecom space for almost 20 years now. When he kept calling TDM analog, my bullshit meter pegged. I still haven’t heard a reason as to why, if this was a TDM equipment issue, it wasn’t highly localized, IE not shit your pants and shutdown the entire US airspace. I would expect that would be last mile, but without specifics, I couldn’t say with certainty. Just the fact that he kept talking about copper lines really narrows the distances we are talking about here. It just isn’t passing the smell test for me.
To me, lt felt like he was describing a routing loop consuming all available bandwidth, and nobody knew how to fix it.
Duffy is now demanding Congress give him another 50 billion in additional emergency funding without saying what it’s being used for.
That’s a lot of reasons.
It also doesn’t make sense because anything this important is fully redundant. There is no fucking way switching over a switch/router from copper to fiber should include any downtime in a datacenter as important as the FAA communication/radar equipment.
A lot of old stuff was working plenty fine before. This is likely the administration following project 2025. They are purposefully making shit fail, “starve the beast” typeshit. So they can enrich the companies and corporations they’ve invested into. They are likely trying to privatize the air traffic controller and communications aspects of the aviation industry right now. I suggest looking up Pages 632-634 of Project 2025.
For those who don’t want to go to The Heritage Foundation’s website, here’s the relevant text:
FEDERAL AVIATION ADMINISTRATION
With a budget of $18.6 billion requested for FY 202311 and an international regulatory footprint, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is DOT’s most visible mode. It needs reform. Air traffic control (ATC) operations account for two-thirds of FAA’s budget, and the Air Traffic Organization (ATO) is far behind its counterparts in Australia, Canada, and Western Europe in implementing 21st century technology. The FAA’s primary mission is ATC; its two smaller functions are distributing federal airport grants and regulating all aspects of aviation safety.
The FAA was once considered the world’s best government aviation agency. Those days are long past. In the more than five decades since 1958 when the Federal Aviation Agency (precursor to the Federal Aviation Administration) was formed, there have been notable developments in air traffic control technology, aircraft avionics, and engine reliability, but despite many well-intentioned attempts, there have been few changes in the FAA’s funding structure. The FAA is still improperly organized and financed, and the management reforms provided in the late 1990s remain largely unused.
The FAA is 10 years older than DOT. It provides two separate and functionally different services: the world’s largest and most complex Air Navigation Service Provider (ANSP) and, at the same time, the world’s largest civil aviation regulatory and certificatory agency. The first is a 24/7/365 air traffic service provider. The second is an inherently governmental organization responsible for ensuring that aerospace operators, vehicles, airports, and ANSPs are properly certified and follow all FAA regulations. These two different organizations ought to run separately.
The FAA is the only modern Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) in the world that does not assess fees for its services. Its funding structure, subject to the annual appropriations process, stifles efficiency and innovation—and the FAA does not innovate well. It spends too much time and money on research and development (R&D) and is not very good at either one. It should get out of the R&D business and focus on testing, evaluating, and certifying private-sector innovation much more quickly than it does today.
The FAA workforce needs to modernize. The agency needs safety and certification experts, not professional airframe and powerplant mechanics (A&Ps). It needs to hire people trained to oversee mechanics, engineers, and pilots. It is time to consider promoting the FAA’s top executive team from within and requiring strict professional requirements for its top appointees. Organizations such as the FAA whose sole responsibility is public safety should be fully auditable and led by experts in their field or industry with oversight from DOT leadership.
For 60 years, the FAA was the global leader in aerospace, from general aviation to commercial space, but the U.S. lead has vanished. The FAA’s overly bureaucratic, legalistic, byzantine, and more recently hyperpoliticized way of processing regulations, adopting innovation, publishing rules, and procuring new technologies has been eclipsed by foreign CAAs and ANSPs that are eagerly certifying drones and creating environments in which new technologies and new entrants, such as air taxis, can thrive. To regain America’s global leadership in aviation, the next Administration should:
In Europe, conventional control towers are being replaced by digital/remote towers with high-resolution cameras and other sensors on tall structures and at points adjoining runways. In Germany and Scandinavia, as many as 15 small airports can be controlled from one remote tower center. The FAA has yet to certify a single digital/remote tower.
Text messaging between controllers and pilots is widespread over the oceans. The ATO began to implement what is now called DataComm in 2002 but suspended the project in 2003. This was restarted at airport control towers in 2016, but as of October 2022, it was available in only seven of the 20 high-altitude control centers.
Current technology enables flights to be managed “anywhere from anywhere,” but the ATO resists consolidating its 20 aging centers into a much smaller number—and lacks the funds to consolidate them. The FAA as regulator and the ATO as traffic manager have no plans in place to handle millions of drones and other emerging technologies such as electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft.
These shortcomings have been documented over many decades by the Government Accountability Office and DOT Inspector General. One peer-reviewed study for the Hudson Institute by scholar Robert Poole identified the ATO’s underlying problems as including an overly cautious culture, a growing lack of technological and managerial expertise, the inability to finance major capital projects with revenue bonds, and overdependence on aerospace/defense contractors.
All of these problems are interrelated. Because of the ATO’s lack of top-notch engineers and program managers, it has become dependent on aerospace contractors, unlike counterparts in Canada and the United Kingdom. Operating within the constraints imposed by the annual congressional appropriations process—and with no bonding authority—the ATO is forced to implement major projects piecemeal over many years. The ATO’s overly cautious culture appears to stem from its being embedded in a safety regulatory agency rather than being regulated at arm’s length (as are airlines and airports).
Three organizational changes, all requiring legislation, offer the likelihood of dealing with these problems based on the experiences of air traffic providers in Canada and Europe. They could be implemented one at a time or together.
Shorter-term reforms could include implementing user fees for unconventional airspace users (for example, advanced air mobility, space launch, and recovery) and giving the ATO a deadline after which it could not authorize or fund any more nondigital/remote control towers. These reforms would also require legislation.
Believe it or not those communications lines they are on are singular, there is not redundancy. Yes, it’s that stupid, they’ve been that stupid about it. Other things may have happened and they may be lying, but there is only one system of communications lines.
Source: your ass.
I work with the US government. So, on one hand that wouldn’t surprise me. But on the other hand for something this important they often have really strict rules and I would need some actual evidence to trust you. Tech debt in these government agencies is insane and it wouldn’t surprise me too much if they just had an ancient system that doesn’t support redundancy or something like that.
I remember I had a friend who worked for the DOJ in like 2010 and told me they didn’t have the technology to print more than one page at a time lol. So yeah I wouldn’t be surprised, especially with something so critical where they’re not going to want to switch over when it could cause issues like this.
Citation needed, my experience tells me otherwise
It’s possible these 60 experienced Air Traffic Controllers are competent, though, and can’t relate to the shitty people who make bad decisions who are in charge right now
My experience with controllers is that they know their job extremely well, but often make confident assertions about the software that they use that have no basis in reality.
It’s also possible that there’s a bunch of terminology that’s being slung around inexactly. Non-technical people are hearing “switch,” for example, and are all hearing different things. Even me, a fairly technical person that runs a home network, am not familiar with enterprise-level switch technology and all its intricacies. My assumptions on hearing Duffy’s explainations are different than an expert’s and a laymen’s.
When he says switch, he almost certainly means router, as most enterprise routers provide integrated layer 3 and layer 3 functionality
My guess is that they created a routing loop in the core network which ate up all available bandwidth.
“these types of switches that the FAA is doing, they don’t happen during the day” This is very confusingly worded. Switches to what? From what? Wasn’t Duffy talking about “switches and routers” as in the network devices? Not “switches” as an action.
Could be the switches from copper lines to fiber line
probably, but it’s weird wording, and not what Duffy was saying. I still think Duffy was talking bullshit, but this is not a counterargument.