US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has blamed America's ageing air traffic control system and a faulty wire router for the recent massive aviation shutdown across the country, which left planes stranded on the tarmac up and down the US and continues to cause delays for UK flights.
Routine maintenance triggers system-wide failure
Speaking at a press conference on 14 November, Duffy explained that during "routine maintenance" at a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) site, a contractor was replacing old copper wire with high-tech fibre. For an as yet unknown reason, this caused a massive surge across the whole system.
He said: "The router that was being replaced as we switched from copper to fibre started flooding other routers in our air traffic control system. Specifically, we had over 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds."
Impact on communications and radar
"What that did was cause issues with our communications with airplanes, and it also caused some disruption to our radar feeds," Duffy added.
He said work was already under way to determine the exact cause, stating: "What we're working to determine is whether we had incompetence, meaning user error or installation error from L3Harris, or whether they installed a faulty router," emphasising that they "haven't determined what the fault was."
Safety-first response
Duffy concluded: "When we see that, your safety is paramount. We shut down the airspace, get you on the ground, work on isolating the problem and then open the airspace back up, which is what we did yesterday."
