Transportation Secretary calls for telecom upgrades after FAA ground stop

Washington — Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Sunday that “we have to get off old network, old telecom” after a telecommunication outage that officials said stemmed from overloaded routers prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to order a rare nationwide ground stop on Friday.  

“For decades, this work in the FAA has not been done. It hasn’t been done because it’s hard,” Duffy said on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.”

The ground stop resulted in thousands of canceled flights and stranded travelers, creating chaos in the nation’s airports at the start of the weekend. Officials said that FAA telecommunications contractor L3Harris Technologies had performed maintenance updates at a remote facility to replace aging copper communications lines with fiber optic connections. And as the router was being switched, it started flooding other routers and overloaded the system.

Duffy said the FAA is looking into why, when it conducted the installation in El Dorado, Arkansas, it started to broadcast data, but also why a second issue occurred at a facility in Amarillo, Texas, where work had been conducted weeks earlier. He said along with L3Harris, which operates and owns the network, the FAA is on site and the FBI is offering support. 

“We’re looking at that right now, and when we know what the root cause of this issue was — was it the install from L3Harris, was it the router — I’m going to tell you and the American people what we find,” he said. 

Duffy said for the telecom in El Dorado, it was an old copper wire that had become unusable. He said, “We were forced by the telecom provider to actually update that copper to fiber, and we brought in our routers and did the work. And that’s when we saw the flooding of the network.”

“So this is part of our maintenance that we do on this really old architecture of a telecom network,” Duffy said.

The transportation secretary said the work was done “appropriately,” noting that it’s been done thousands of times and “this has never happened.” He explained that normally, work is done on big facilities overnight. But for remote locations, that work can be conducted during the day, “Because the risk, historically, has been very low.”

“Obviously, on Friday we saw no; it flooded our network, and we had to take the extraordinary step of issuing a ground stop,” he said. 

Duffy stressed that upgrades are necessary, saying the system should be “built brand new,” while noting that “the rest of the world — every institution, every company, not just in the U.S. but around the world — they’ve all switched over to digital and fiber.”

The transportation secretary said over 70% of copper lines have been switched over to fiber “without incident,” pointing to almost 470 radios having been switched over and new electronic flight strips and towers. 

On Friday, Duffy said the FAA needs $50 billion from Congress to overhaul the telecom network. On Sunday, Duffy reiterated his pitch, saying that although the FAA received funds when Congress allocated money under the One Big Beautiful Bill, Congress was “very specific in how we spend it.”

“They specifically said how I spend the money, and I’ve and I’ve got it all spent, ready to be deployed by the end of the president’s tenure in office,” Duffy said. “But what I don’t have money for is a new telecom system. I don’t have money for new software. Those are critical pieces to the infrastructure, and it’s been historically underinvested in.”

Duffy said he is “making the case to the American people and the Congress — for the first time, the FAA is taking your money, and we’re actually building with your money. Let me continue. Let’s finish the job, let’s not see what happened on Friday — let’s not let it happen again.”

President Trump also weighed in on Sunday, urging Congress to approve the funding. 

“Much of our current air control system is 50 years old – RIDICULOUS!” he said in a post on Truth Social. “We have already started the work, but it should be done all at once, not in drips and drabs. Congress must approve.”

Rep. Jim Himes, a Connecticut Democrat who also appeared on “Face the Nation” on Sunday, said, “This is not a Congress money problem.”