PENNY L.A. SHEPARD

Every plane in America got grounded on Friday, and the guy in charge left out the most important detail... Something starts going wrong inside the network that connects all of America’s air traffic control centers. A router at one remote FAA site starts spitting out a flood of data to every other router it’s connected to, and it keeps doing that for about 45 minutes. Controllers start seeing radar and radio drop in and out. And the FAA can’t figure out why. 3:36 p.m. Eastern. The FAA pulls the plug and grounds the entire country. Nothing takes off. Over 3,500 planes are already up there. By the end of it, 17 of the 22 big regional centers that handle planes at cruising altitude got hit. So now everybody’s sitting there for hours with no answers. 8:30 p.m. Sean Duffy and Markwayne Mullin finally come out at the White House. Mullin talks first. He says no sign of a cyberattack, nothing to do with that big Microsoft outage the day before, and nobody was ever in danger. But he doesn’t say what actually broke. Then Duffy’s up. And for about seven minutes it’s basically a speech about how old everything is. Old switches getting overloaded with data. “1980s little copper lines.” Twenty-five years of administrations that didn’t fix it. And Congress, which he says needs to come up with $50 billion. He even mentions that the newer switches he’d already installed didn’t go down. First question from a reporter: can you rule out a cyberattack? Duffy passes it to Mullin. Then about fourteen minutes into the whole thing, Mullin mentions, kind of in passing, that the FAA had been putting in patches and new equipment, and the new stuff looked like it overwhelmed the older system. That’s a big deal. Because that means somebody was working on it. And Duffy doesn’t follow up on that at all. He goes back to the funding pitch. When reporters ask why there wasn’t a backup plan, he says they didn’t expect an outage like this. When they ask what made Friday different, he says they’re still working on the details. That’s Friday night. Saturday morning. Duffy posts that planes are moving again and it’s safe to fly. Then he holds a press conference over at the Department of Transportation, this time with FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford next to him. And now we get the actual story. A contractor was out at a remote FAA site doing what Duffy called routine maintenance. They were moving phone lines off old copper wire and onto fiber, and replacing a router as part of that. That router is the one that started flooding the network. The contractor is L3Harris, the company that’s run this FAA communications network for over 20 years. So when Duffy said Friday night the old system got overloaded? Technically true. But what overloaded it was the upgrade work. And Duffy’s tone on L3Harris is very different this morning. He says they’re trying to figure out if this was “incompetence,” meaning L3Harris installed it wrong, or if L3Harris put in a bad router. He says they don’t know yet. He says L3Harris, or whoever made that router, has to do better. He says that until the new system gets built, he’s stuck with L3Harris because they own the network. And he calls the whole thing an FAA system that “didn’t meet the moment.” He does make one fair point. He says the routers they’re replacing are about 25 years old and were supposed to be swapped out back in 2006. So yeah, the equipment really is old. But here’s what makes the Friday night version so strange. This copper-to-fiber switch IS the upgrade. Congress already approved $12.5 billion to overhaul air traffic control, billions of it for telecom, and Duffy said himself that over 90% of the telecom money would go to replacing copper with fiber. L3Harris says that job is already more than 70% finished. So Friday night he was asking for more money to fix the copper, while the copper fix was the thing that was happening when it all fell apart. And he didn’t bring that up until Saturday. A couple more things from this morning. Duffy said this kind of work at small remote sites is normally done during the day. On the live system. He says they’re going to rethink that now. Bedford said they saw instability they couldn’t explain, and that’s why they grounded everyone. He also said the real root cause still isn’t known... which is interesting because we have heard MULTIPLE "certain" causes at this point. L3Harris put out a statement saying it’s helping with the investigation and takes this seriously. But interestingly, it didn’t say what went wrong. And this isn’t new territory. Back in 2009, a tech working for Harris Corp., the company that later became part of L3Harris, set up a router wrong while moving this same network to fiber. That took out 129 air traffic facilities. Also, the FAA already picked AT&T back in August to build a brand new network to replace this one. The target is December 2028. The FAA says a full root cause report is coming... we’ll see what it says.