“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.’”
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.