FULL PRESSER: Sean Duffy Reveals What Caused Nationwide US Flight Shutdown, Warns Contractor — AP1G

[1:51] Go back on mic. There we go. Is there audio? Let's see. One more mic check. Hang on, hang on, hang on. You okay with that, guys? Secretary, could you speak to us? Yeah. You okay with that? I think it's good. Guys, are we good? I think so. Yeah. Guys, guys. Now, is that good? All right. We're good? All right. More tech issues. Let's do the press conference. Sorry about that. We're getting some feedback earlier. I just want to again start off and [3:13] thank our air traffic controllers, our pilots. They exhibited amazing performance yesterday. We had 3,500 aircraft in the air. We had a ground stop and they safely landed all of our aircraft, which was outstanding. But also want to thank our flight attendants, our ground crews, our airport authorities. All of them rallied yesterday. A lot of passengers in airports. They all came together, served the American people incredibly well. I also want to thank the passengers. I know a lot of people were [3:43] disrupted. Whether they were going on vacation. They were coming home from work. They had significant disruption and the patients that they exhibited. We at the DOT and the FAA are grateful for that patience. [3:56] I'm going to Administrator Bedford in a few moments just talk about the status of where we're at right now. But we are back at full operations. But what does that mean for air travel today? What does it mean for tomorrow? And what does it mean as we come into heightened air travel? [4:14] As we come into Thanksgiving vacation, which is almost near the Super Bowl for aviation as people are traveling around the country? He'll talk about that in a few moments. But I want to talk about what actually happened yesterday. [4:29] Now, those of you who are aviation reporters have heard me talk about a decades-old air traffic control system. And it's not just old equipment. We have an incredibly old telecommunication system. [4:43] And so here's what we believe happened yesterday. In at least one of our remote FAA locations, a contractor was doing routine maintenance to switch telecommunication lines from old copper wire. [4:55] And they were bringing it over to fiber. And they were bringing it over to fiber. That contractor that does the work for us is L3Harris. [5:01] They're our legacy provider. They've been working for the FAA for over 20 years. And the network that we use at the FAA to control the airspace, L3Harris actually owns that network. [5:15] Now, the work happening was due to the age of the copper wire that we were replacing. It was such an old wire that it was being discontinued, meaning that line was going to get shut down. [5:31] So we had to switch it over from old copper. We had to bring it over to fiber, going from TDM to IP or from analog to digital. [5:41] Now, I want to be clear. This work has been happening in America for decades. Virtually every single institution in America has gone from copper to fiber, from analog to digital. [5:53] I just maybe the FAA is the last one to be doing this work because the investments haven't been made. But this is not complicated. It's it's pretty straightforward work that we were doing yesterday at, again, a very remote location. [6:06] So what we're working to determine was whether we had incompetence, meaning was it user error or installator error from L3Harris or did they install a faulty router? [6:21] We haven't determined what the fault was. Was it the router or were they not doing great work for us at L3Harris? [6:28] Either through contractor error or a faulty piece of equipment, that router that was being replaced as we switched from copper to fiber, it started flooding other routers in our air traffic control system. [6:43] So specifically, we had over 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds. And what that did was gave us issues with our communication with airplanes. [6:58] And it also caused some disruption with our radar feeds. And when we see that your safety is paramount. We shut down the airspace and we do it safely. We get you on the ground. [7:12] And then we work on isolating the problem and then opening the airspace back up, which is what we did yesterday. [7:21] And as we get more information, we'll give this to you. But I think it's pretty clear. A lot of questions came in yesterday. Was this a cyber attack? Did some foreign nation attack this network? [7:38] And the answer to that is we don't believe so. Once we were able to isolate the work that was being done at this remote location, all of our systems came back online. So we don't believe this was cyber at all. [7:51] This was an FAA system that didn't meet the moment. Our contractor didn't meet the moment or the equipment didn't meet the moment and caused the outages. [8:04] I've been talking about this for almost two years. And I've been asking the Congress for money. I've asked for a lot of money. [8:14] Now, the Congress gave me a partial payment. They gave me twelve and a half billion dollars. And one of the problems that we had was they weren't quite sure that we would spend the money well and we'd build with the money. [8:28] And that's history of the FAA that goes back from Republicans and Democrats. They haven't spent the money well, so they want to make sure we're going to spend and spend it well. [8:37] And we have. And so in the course of the last year since I've got that twelve and a half billion dollars, I want to talk to you about what we've actually accomplished. [8:45] So we have replaced sixty nine percent of the copper communications. We move that over to high speed fiber. Sixty nine percent. [8:54] We've deployed surface awareness initiative initiative technology at one hundred and forty three control towers. [9:00] So instead of just looking out the tower with binoculars, we have a digital screen and representation of the airfield giving an extra tool for air traffic controllers to drive safety, [9:12] whether there's weather or fog or there's an issue with line of sight drive safety into the airspace. [9:18] We've converted four hundred and sixty nine radio sites to modernize those systems. [9:23] So using thirty old thirty year old radios upgrading them to have crisper, clearer communication between air traffic controllers and pilots is critical because we rely on this communication to keep the airspace safe. [9:38] We've installed electronic flight strips at twenty five towers. [9:42] We still use paper flight strips, which is nineteen seventies technology. [9:46] An airplane has passed from one controller to the next using a paper flight strip. [9:51] We're moving to electronic flight strips. Twenty five towers have already been converted. [9:56] We've installed two hundred and twenty four IP voice switch systems at towers. [10:01] We've installed eighteen new tower simulator systems and we've installed nine SMR for surface movement radars. [10:09] So we are building. We are building safely, but we are building fast. [10:14] And I think at this point that the Congress looks at what we've done and the fact that this is a bipartisan movement. [10:23] I hope that they meet this moment and they invest in what will be the state of the art, the best in class, best in the world air traffic control system. [10:34] When I came in, President Trump before the DCA air crash was saying we have to modernize our airspace. [10:41] I want you to work on modernizing air traffic control. [10:45] He said it from before I was sworn in and when we have a president who is willing to lean in and lead on an issue like this. [10:55] And then if you look at the Congress that you have both Democrats and Republicans who understand how important this is. [11:01] For me, it gets to be frustrating where everyone says they want to do it and the president is pushing it. [11:07] But we don't get the resources. And I think this is the moment if if we don't start to switch out our systems. [11:13] How long are we going to wait America in Congress? [11:18] And I think this is this is a sign for them to lean in. This is bipartisan. [11:23] By the way, most of the money that's spent is spent in Democrat cities. [11:27] That's where our biggest airports are at in Democrat states. [11:30] This is where this is where the money is deployed. [11:32] And it it drives efficiency in the airspace, but it more importantly drives safety in the airspace. [11:39] Americans want less delays. They want less cancellations. [11:42] We have I want to be clear on this. We have the safest airspace in the world. [11:48] No one competes with us on safety. And by the way, we have the busiest airspace in the world, meaning we have more commercial and general aviation bar none. [11:57] No one comes close to what we do in our airspace. [12:00] And if you look at what happened yesterday, I think that underscores the point that you have men and women who know how when we're going to land planes and land them in a short period of time. [12:11] They do it really well. The training of the pilots and controllers is exceptional. [12:16] But we shouldn't rely on their training should our air traffic control system go down. [12:22] We should be able to rely on our air traffic control system, making sure it works. [12:27] And what I appreciate the president. I've had a number of conversations with him and he's he's passionate about it. [12:34] I've talked to a number of Democrats and Republican legislators leaders. They, too, are passionate. [12:39] So I think this is the time in the moment. But the president, I thought it was great. [12:43] He he in my phone calls with him. He said, you know what? I I want you to know that I will commit every resource of the federal government. [12:51] Whatever you need. I'm willing to give those resources to the FAA to make sure you guys can do this, do it fast, do it right. [12:59] So let's not let the legacy of the past where investments weren't made investments were made, which is why we are here today. [13:08] Let's make the investments and look forward to a brighter future in aviation, a safer future, a more efficient future in aviation. [13:17] And I think this is this is one of those moments when if you look at a lot of the partisanship in Washington and there's a lot, a lot of disagreement. [13:28] We just came out of an election. This is a time that I think the Congress can signal. [13:32] You know what? We Democrats and Republicans in the House and the Senate, we're willing to work together. [13:37] We're willing to work with D.O.T. and the FAA will work with President Trump. [13:42] We can fight on a lot of things, but we're not going to fight on this. We're going to work with you. [13:46] We want to test your numbers. We want to push your numbers. [13:49] We want to make sure you're doing what you say you're going to do. [13:51] But we're going to give you the dollars to make sure you make these investments on behalf of the American people. [13:56] And so I hope they'll do that with us. We'll continue to communicate with the Hill. [14:03] But this is a bipartisan moment that I think our kids and our grandkids can look back on and say, thank you. [14:09] Thank you. This Congress at this moment with this President, thank you for leading and fixing a system that has been sorely underinvested in. [14:19] This is the moment to get this done. No better moment than now. [14:22] So with that, I want to just I want to thank Administrator Bedford. [14:26] He has done just a fantastic job with modernization, leading the FAA. [14:32] He left a great job running an airline and came in. [14:36] And I'm not sure you're happy with that right now, Mr. Administrator. [14:39] But he has done wonderful work. [14:41] I want to pass it off to him to give you an update on where we're at with the airspace. [14:45] Thank you, Mr. Secretary. Good morning. [14:50] First of all, I'd like to start with an apology, sincere apology to the American traveling public. [14:56] Tens of thousands of Americans had their flights disrupted yesterday. [14:59] And I want you to understand we did that out of an abundance of caution. [15:03] I'd also like to add my thanks, echo what the secretary said. [15:06] We had controllers who worked throughout the night helping through the recovery, maintenance technicians, [15:11] our airline partners, our airport partners, everybody came together to try to mitigate this just as quickly as possible [15:18] and to take care of the travelers that were out there. [15:21] So, again, I'm sorry that we put you through this. [15:24] But we did it for the right reasons. [15:25] As the secretary mentioned, the system started to exhibit some instability. [15:29] And over a course of about 45 minutes, we could not assess the cause of the instability, [15:35] at which point about 345 yesterday we implemented a ground stop. [15:39] We did that because we felt it was helpful to remove pressure from the system, [15:45] holding airplanes on the ground while we continue to work through the root cause analysis of the instability in the system, [15:52] and ultimately to relieve stress and complexity in the airspace. [15:57] I think that was the right call, and we stand behind that. [16:00] As we went into Friday, we had 50,000 flights scheduled to operate. [16:06] When we went into the ground stop at approximately 345 p.m. East Coast time yesterday, [16:12] we had completed about 30,000 of those flights either on the ground or in the air. [16:18] So, we had 20,000 more flights to complete. [16:21] Over the course of the four-hour ground stop, we were ultimately able to recover about 8,000 of those 20,000 flights. [16:30] Over the course of the 12,000, we were unable to recover. [16:33] Over those 12,000 flights, the breakdown is roughly 3,000 were private jet general aviation flights and 9,000 commercial flights. [16:43] This morning, the system remains stable, and our airline partners are working through the operational recovery. [16:51] What does that mean? [16:53] Well, of course, we have crews and aircraft that are out of position, the 12,000 flights that were lost. [16:59] Those crews, pilots, and flight attendants need to get to their points of reconnection with their schedules. [17:07] Our airline partners are working through that. [17:09] We do anticipate somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 of the 41,000 flights that are scheduled today likely will cancel. [17:19] So, we will still have delays and cancellations today, but that will set us up for a full recovery tomorrow. [17:25] Based on everything that we're hearing from our airline partners, they believe that they'll be able to have full schedule integrity by the close of business on Sunday. [17:33] So, I do think the worst is behind us, but we still do have a significant amount of recovery work to do with our airline stakeholder group. [17:42] Again, my thanks to controllers who worked tirelessly over the evening to try to get these 8,000 flights launched last night. [17:50] Our airline pilots and flight attendants who stuck with us, you know, through the delays in order to get customers to their destination safely and on time. [17:58] I do think we've identified the fault, and I want to reiterate, we see zero evidence of anything nefarious and zero evidence of anything AI related. [18:13] So, we want to be clear that we have an equipment issue, and we're working through what this defective piece of equipment was. [18:21] Again, as the Secretary said, was it a faulty installation? Was it a faulty configuration? [18:26] Or was it just a bad piece of router technology that we put into this system that propagated these errors? [18:33] When we have that root cause analysis complete, we'll share it with you. [18:39] I've also, as the Secretary indicated, I've communicated with all four corners of both chambers. [18:46] This is a bipartisan issue. Safety is paramount, but efficiency and reliability to the system is also extremely important for the American traveling public. [18:56] So, I do believe that, you know, we'll have a very transparent hearing on what actually happened. [19:06] Again, we're giving you the best information that we have at our disposal this morning. [19:10] And I want to reiterate the fact that safety is, in fact, the most important thing. [19:15] So, we will always, out of abundance of caution, ensure that every flight that we put into the airspace will be operated safely. [19:22] With that, I'll pass it back off for questions. [19:29] Yeah, we'll do questions. Let me just make one other point. [19:31] You mentioned SI or AI. I've heard some questions out there. [19:36] We've, a couple months ago, we deployed our smart system to help us better navigate weather and trajectories. [19:44] This is a system that's not tied into or connected to the systems that went down yesterday. [19:51] It's a tool that gives a prompt to one of our flight managers that they can accept or deny. [19:58] But, it's just better information point to them. [20:01] But, there is no connection from this tool. [20:03] So, smart had zero impact on the occurrences yesterday. [20:10] I've seen some of the issues online and the speculation wasn't smart. [20:15] We think it was a single location. [20:17] And, with that, happy to take your questions. [20:20] Yeah. [20:21] Upgrade was made at 3 o'clock. [20:27] Why? [20:29] Why not, say, at midnight on a Saturday? [20:34] Yes. [20:36] Are there any changes? [20:38] So, I first want to, I'll answer this a great question. [20:42] Thank you for asking it. [20:44] Safety is paramount. [20:47] And, if we don't make these upgrades, we have a less safe system. [20:52] We can't continue on technology of the 80s. [20:56] I mean, we spend over $200 million a year in obsolescence fees. [21:01] We have to pay to use these old copper wires. [21:05] We have to get off of them. [21:07] They're less reliable. [21:08] So, we have to make the transition. [21:10] And, we're making transition not because we want to spend money. [21:14] We're making the transition because it's safer and it's more resilient. [21:17] But, because of the nature of what this switchover was, it was a remote location. [21:25] We'll do those during the day. [21:27] Now, if we're going to be at Newark, if we're going to be, you know, in one of our big facilities, [21:31] those switchovers happen at night. [21:34] And, they can have a bigger impact. [21:36] But, these smaller locations don't have that kind of impact or they shouldn't have that kind of impact, [21:42] which is what we saw yesterday. [21:44] So, there will be a reevaluation of when we do this work. [21:48] But, when you look across the country, when the work has been done from copper to fiber, [21:55] going from analog to digital, they've happened at all times of the day. [21:59] And, so, we have to drill in a little further about what happened here. [22:03] Again, was it air on behalf of or from our contractor, L3 Harris, or was it faulty equipment? [22:08] And, when we have that, we'll share that with you. [22:10] Yes. [22:20] And, if I get this wrong, Rebecca, you can correct me. [22:22] We shut, we isolated this upgrade that was happening that was sending all of this data into our network. [22:29] Once that went, we took that out, then the network came back online. [22:34] So, we were able to isolate it, identify it, and then the network began to work. [22:38] So, this is L3 Harris. [22:46] And, so, if you want, I'll take a moment. [22:48] It's our legacy telecom network. [22:50] It's owned by L3 Harris. [22:53] With our new architecture, with the money that we're requesting, we will work with the greatest telecom companies in the world, [23:01] which will be AT&T, Verizon, and Lumens. [23:04] They're all working with us on the new architecture. [23:07] But, in the meantime, until I can build that, I'm stuck with L3 Harris, who owns this network. [23:13] And... [23:15] Can I just... [23:16] Sure. [23:17] I think we're conflating modernization with this upgrade at this particular facility. [23:24] We spend a billion dollars a year maintaining and sustaining the existing, you know, 1980s TDMI telco network. [23:32] Call it, you know, 1G, the 1G system that the FAA's on. [23:36] So, we are constantly replacing 2,000, you know, Cisco 600 routers with Juniper routers, right? [23:43] So, I mean, this is ordinary course of business stuff. [23:46] This is not part of the paraton FAA, $12.5 billion modernization effort. [23:51] So, let's not conflate those two things. [24:00] ...where the problem was or where the issue was. [24:03] It would be so helpful if you could walk us through, minute by minute, what happened or what was happening before the instability began at around 3.30 PM. [24:13] What was your first alarm or indication that something was going wrong? [24:17] And what was the first facility? [24:19] Can you give us a tick-top of how this all unfolded from where you were sitting and what you were seeing? [24:25] Minute by minute, no. [24:27] But I'll give you the slightly more granular understanding. [24:31] So, we started to experience instability. [24:33] What does instability mean? [24:35] Well, within every facility, we have multiple levels of redundancy. [24:39] Primary, backup. [24:40] Within the primary, an A and a B channel. [24:42] Within the backup, an A and a B channel. [24:44] And even a tertiary. [24:45] We never want to get there. [24:47] A system for communicating both radar surveillance data as well as voice air-to-ground communications. [24:53] We started seeing instability at 17 of our 22 en route facilities that we couldn't explain. [25:01] And as we're going through the diagnostic, we see this propagate into some of our low-altitude radar facilities, known as TRACONs, affecting both voice and ground communications on our primary lines. [25:16] This tells us it wasn't a software issue with either our ERAM's application or our STARS application. [25:22] This tells us it was something to do with the FTI telco system, which got our focus there. [25:28] And again, looking for things like, were we doing work in the system? [25:32] That maintenance is done manually. [25:34] Logged manually. [25:35] Right? [25:36] Not digitally. [25:37] So imagine sheets of paper that we have to pour through to figure out who's working on what. [25:43] Because of our lack of identifying the root cause, we were unwilling to take any risk that this propagation could actually result in a center losing connectivity with aircraft. [26:01] So what, in this situation, enabled such a widespread of so many different regions and so many points to go down at the same time without a backup? [26:15] Well, first of all, let's be clear. [26:17] Nothing went down. [26:18] What we saw was instability. [26:20] And we couldn't explain the instability. [26:22] And we saw the instability start to propagate into facilities we couldn't identify. [26:28] That's when we made the decision to ground stop out of an abundance of caution. [26:32] But no facilities went dark. [26:34] Nothing was fully lost. [26:36] In terms of how the system is architected, we have one federal telephony infrastructure. [26:42] One. [26:43] We don't have two. [26:44] We have one. [26:45] So yes, when we lose, for example, I think back in September, we had a massive Amtrak line cut. [26:52] And it took out our mid-Atlantic facilities. [26:55] All of the redundancy was severed. [26:59] So there is no backup to the backup. [27:03] The backups are integral to each of the facilities, multiple lines of communication, three levels of redundancy. [27:09] But when we lose the ability for the routers to communicate the data, I'm not sure if you're old enough to remember what TDMI is, but this is a, you know, T1 line telephony infrastructure. [27:23] It hasn't been in production for decades. [27:26] We sustain it. [27:27] And that's what was going on at this remote communication facility was a sustainment process that propagated all of this, you know, what did you say, a thousand logon attempts. [27:37] So that then overwhelmed one set of routers in an in-route facility, which then went to the backups at other in-route facilities, and it propagated from there. [27:44] Dave Shepardson for Reuters. [27:49] So this one router, a Juniper router that got installed, we don't know yet whether it was a faulty router or they were misinstalled. [27:58] Is that right? [28:00] Is there any lessons going forward in terms of how do you, how do we ensure that the system is so old and so frail that when you're doing routine maintenance that might lead to some sort of catastrophic problem, doing it at times that might go ahead and tape us for about having trouble? [28:16] Well, again, this type of work has been going on for years. [28:19] You know, this, again, this isn't modernization. [28:22] This is sustainment, and it's been going on for years. [28:25] So I think the lesson learned, when we get to a root cause analysis, whatever we do learn from that, of course, we will pivot in terms of how we do future sustainment. [28:34] Yes, ma'am. [28:36] Yes, we've been working closely with all of the aviation stakeholders. [28:57] They're waiving all of their terms and conditions. [29:01] Everyone will either be reaccommodated on a flight or they'll get a full refund. [29:05] They should, but everyone should reach out to their air carriers directly. [29:09] Yes, sir. [29:10] You mentioned you think this is the moment for Congress to act. [29:17] You also mentioned the DCA flight crash. [29:19] The families of those victims are going to be here in Washington next week calling on Congress to do something after the loss of their level one. [29:26] What makes you hopeful that this is the moment for action from Congress for air safety across the country? [29:31] I think this is a case in point of the system. [29:37] And when these events happen, I think Americans ask, well, what's the solution? [29:42] And we're telling America and the Congress what the solution is. [29:45] And the families have been very supportive of our effort to get these resources. [29:51] I want to make one other point on the ask to Congress. [29:54] We have one of the most historic coalitions that are pushing the Hill to get the money for modernization. [30:02] And it's bipartisan as well. [30:04] I think we'll have a bipartisan interest on the Hill. [30:06] But we have unions, whether it's our air traffic controllers, our pilots, our flight attendants. [30:13] We have the airlines. [30:14] We have the business. [30:15] Just like everybody, like 60 organizations who oftentimes don't agree on a lot of issues with each other, they all agree on this. [30:22] And so when you have this unique coalition from the outside, I'm hoping that there'll be a unique coalition on the inside on the Hill that meets the call. [30:32] And the president's going to work with everybody. [30:35] Day one call from the president, he's going to work with Democrats and Republicans to make this a reality. [30:42] Rebecca. [31:09] Thanks for the question. [31:12] And so when we started to see the occurrence where our network was having instability, we started to look at what was the cause. [31:20] And as such, we saw two places that were actually pinging our network at a very high rate, a thousand connections over every four to five seconds. [31:30] We disabled both of those right away and were able to stabilize our network. [31:36] What we are doing is that root cause analysis. [31:39] We did some things right away. [31:42] That router that we think was the original, we stopped functionality in all of that across the NAS. [31:49] There are only about 60 right now that actually are deployed in the NAS. [31:53] We shut down some of that functionality so we would not see that propagate throughout. [31:57] We are also doing additional testing with L3 to verify if there is any additional risk. [32:03] But at this time, we do believe what occurred with that router has been worked through. [32:08] Did we know this? [32:09] We did not. [32:15] And that is exactly why we want to continue to verify and do analysis as we go forward. [32:20] There's a lot of things when it comes to data. [32:28] Microsoft is grounded. [32:32] Certain people are angry because their flights were disrupted. [32:37] Do you have any messages full about these? [32:39] I know you mentioned that they are not connected, but is there anything you would like to speak to? [32:44] Yes. [32:45] The number one mission at FAA and our air traffic organization is to fly people to their destination safely. [32:50] And we will. [32:51] And air on the side of safety will keep airplanes on the ground unless we are 100% confident. [32:56] We've got the stability and the resiliency to operate safely. [32:59] The redundancy isn't just within the FAA. [33:02] It's our teams on the ground. [33:05] It's our teams in the air, the pilots, our controllers. [33:08] The whole infrastructure is designed with multiple layers of safety and redundancy. [33:12] So I'm confident, very, very confident, that the system is operating as safe today as it was two weeks ago. [33:19] But we should understand every, I think every agency within the government for better than two decades has flagged this FTI system as a critical weakness. [33:31] So this is probably one of the worst kept secrets in government that this FTI system needs to be replaced. [33:38] Now, Rebecca and her team have done all the engineering design to bring us into the 21st century on a modern system. [33:45] But without the funding, we can't go execute around that. [33:49] So look, we have to keep the existing system operating at the very best of our ability, which we are spending a lot of sustainment dollars to keep the FTI system functioning. [34:00] But let's not kid ourselves. [34:02] It will continue to break until we replace it. [34:05] Do we see that there's any cyber threats or potential foreign hacking? [34:12] Is there a longer investigation that we're looking at to ensure that that is truly the case? [34:16] Well, yes, that's happening across government. [34:19] That's just not an FAA issue. [34:21] You know, the cybersecurity threat is a huge focus for this administration across all of our potential vulnerabilities. [34:27] So, again, that was the first place we went. [34:30] The president and the secretary activated the White House Situation Room. [34:35] All of the national security infrastructure was assembled to look at this. [34:39] We had FBI and facilities investigating. [34:42] I think we've all concluded that it's not a cyber issue. [34:45] It was Kash Patel, including DNI, war. [34:55] Everybody was pitching in yesterday on our conference call because we were very concerned. [35:00] Was this cyber? [35:01] Was this a threat from a foreign nation, a foreign actor? [35:05] And we have amazing teams in the federal government. [35:09] They weren't seeing chatter, but they weren't seeing any indication. [35:14] And when we were able to isolate this location and take it offline and the system came back online, [35:20] we feel very comfortable that that was the root cause of the impact on our system. [35:26] It wasn't a foreign actor. [35:30] And I want to address something else that you asked. [35:34] What we did yesterday's routine, this has happened thousands and thousands of times over the course of decades in America, right? [35:41] And these issues don't happen, which begs the question for us, what did L3 Harris do? [35:48] Did they make mistakes yesterday? [35:50] They own this network. [35:51] They're our prime contractor. [35:53] I can't go somewhere else. [35:54] They own it. [35:55] Or was it a faulty router? [35:57] And we're going to find that out. [35:59] And frankly, we're going to hold people accountable. [36:01] Listen, we can't we can't have people. [36:03] This is what I found when I got here. [36:04] And I think Brian would attest to this as well. [36:07] Many of our many of our contractors, many of our partners, they take our money and they provide really poor service to us. [36:15] Full stop. [36:16] And we have demanded more. [36:19] We've demanded better because the American people deserve better. [36:22] And we're getting better performance from everyone who's doing business with us now. [36:27] We need L3 Harris or whoever provided that router to us to do a better job. [36:32] Because if you look at the cost of what happened yesterday, if you like football, I know we've had some disruptions to the football, the college football schedule. [36:41] Some games are being moved. [36:42] That's not the most important thing. [36:44] But we do want to move teams around the country so we can have playoffs happen. [36:50] As Brian mentioned, though, the key part of this is moving the general public and keeping them safe. [36:58] I'll agree that you have an answer question in the back. [37:00] So we are going to do a review of what happened. [37:29] And we learn from issues that come up in the airspace or with aviation incidents. [37:35] And from that, we'll make decisions. [37:38] Now, we're also very cognizant of when Americans are using the airspace, say, at Christmas or Fourth of July or Thanksgiving, [37:46] and we minimize activity in the airspace during those big movements that happen. [37:54] But in regard to the second question, I'll take that. [37:58] Yes. [37:59] So, again, none of the facilities actually went dark. [38:01] What we had were random reports from different facilities of certain frequencies that were going in and out and requiring them to switch between primaries and backup switching. [38:13] Now, if that had been a single facility, we would have just worked through it. [38:16] But when we saw it go to 2, 3, 10, 17 facilities, that's when we started to realize there was something much larger going on here. [38:25] And since we couldn't explain it quickly, that's when we went to the national ground stop. [38:31] Can I say this also? [38:33] Is it fair to say that the routers that we have in these facilities, they're routers that were in essence manufactured in 2001. [38:44] They were out of service really by 2006. [38:47] So when I tell you that we're using old equipment, we're using old equipment. [38:51] And we are going to continue to push and ask to make sure we deliver on behalf of the American people. [38:58] Go ahead. [39:00] I have a question on funding. [39:02] You talked about the $12.5 billion that Congress has already appropriated. [39:05] How much of that has already been spent? [39:07] And, Secretary, you last week requested $30 billion. [39:10] It was quite a detailed request. [39:12] How do you get from $30 billion in details from last night, $50 billion? [39:16] What do you need and are you prepared to itemize that for us today? [39:19] So, again, the President and I have been in constant communication about this yesterday and today. [39:25] So I did make a request for $30 billion. [39:28] I've talked about $30 billion. [39:30] And what I'm trying to do is get a number that I think the Congress will give me, [39:35] that gets a massive portion of the needs of the airspace completed. [39:42] But if I want to do a full build, if I want to look at runways, I want to look at towers. [39:47] Many of our towers are 50, 75 years old. [39:53] We have some of our airports. [39:55] We have aging infrastructure throughout the airspace, not just on the new telecom that we need, [40:01] our new architecture, not just the new software, by the way, the software that manages the airspace, [40:08] basically built in the 1990s. [40:10] I need that. [40:11] But also there's a whole bunch of other work that has to happen. [40:15] And some towers are very expensive. [40:18] It's not a cheap proposition. [40:21] And so let's make the investment. [40:24] And let's do it now. [40:25] So I'm going to put in that full request. [40:26] I'll detail it and send it over to the Hill in conjunction with the President. [40:30] We'll do that on Monday. [40:32] The exact number. [40:36] So predating me, I came on board about a week after the working family tax cut was passed. [40:44] So I was a beneficiary of the initial $12.5 billion down payment. [40:49] But the secretary put together a plan working with the FAA, and that itemization came out to about $31 billion. [40:56] That's what the agency submitted to Congress to actually get modernization done, completely done. [41:03] And Congress and the House took that $30 billion. [41:08] And I think due to the trust issue said, we'll give you half now and half later. [41:12] So they passed the bill with $15 billion. [41:15] The Senate said, we trust you less. [41:17] So we're going to take another 20% off the top. [41:19] And they gave $12.5 billion is what we got. [41:22] But that leaves $17.5 billion to finish modernization. [41:26] Through the work that we've done, through the negotiations that we've been able to have with industry, [41:31] we think that number is about $10.1 billion to finish modernization. [41:37] So I think, first of all, we're delivering it on speed. [41:40] So I'll do one small correction. [41:43] We're over 70% on the copper to fiber. [41:46] Thank you. [41:47] Not 69. [41:48] So we are moving at speed. [41:49] The FAA is delivering the goods with amazing transparency. [41:53] You guys can see it on our Modern Skies website. [41:56] Everything that we're doing in the NAS, you can see. [41:59] Congress can see. [42:01] So there's tremendous transparency. [42:03] But we've committed about 38% of the budget, the $12.5 billion, is committed to modernization. [42:09] And that tracks with where we're at on our three-year timeline. [42:12] We're a little over a third of the way through our gates. [42:15] And we've spent a little over a third of the money. [42:17] Can I have one thing really quick on to the point of what the $12.5 billion is for? [42:24] It is to digitize all our old technology. [42:28] The technology that had already been digital actually continued to be okay during this time. [42:37] So that is why we do believe what we are doing with the $12.5 billion is moving us to that future. [42:44] So we need to continue. [42:46] And to the point, we need additional funding to actually finish the job. [42:50] So this is resiliency. [42:52] I want to answer your question specifically as well. [42:54] When the Congress gave us the $12.5 billion, you might say, [42:57] well, why don't you take the money that's left over and put it – we seem to have telecom issues. [43:01] Why don't we put this money into telecom and start building this new architecture? [43:05] Well, when the Senate gave us the money, they were very specific in how we could spend the money. [43:11] So I have specific tranches of money of what they said we could build. [43:15] Now, radar – we don't build radar in America until now. [43:22] We're going to spend this money to buy American radar with American workers. [43:26] Well, it takes time for us to stand up manufacturing facilities in this country. [43:32] So we have one in Florida and we have one in Kansas. [43:36] But as those come online, we're going to start taking delivery of radar. [43:39] So it takes a little bit of time. By the way, no one has an order as big as ours. [43:44] So we're not buying things off the shelf. [43:47] The companies we've contracted with have to build much of what we're buying. [43:52] And they're doing a great job. [43:54] But this part of the $12.5 billion will be completed by the end of 2028 before President Trump leaves office. [44:01] And let me just leave you – if we finish this and we are on time, we're probably a little under budget. [44:06] We're spending money very well. [44:08] If we have that done, and then we work on the new common automation platform, the new system that manages our air traffic in the national airspace. [44:19] And we get the architecture done. [44:21] All of this could be completed at about the same time at the end of 2028. [44:26] Maybe the telecom would be done the first quarter of 2029. [44:31] But it would all be done at the same time for a brand new state-of-the-art air traffic control system. [44:37] If we don't do that, then you start to piecemeal. [44:40] And you get one part done, you know, by the end of 28, you might get funding in a couple of years, and maybe it's going to be done in, you know, 2032. [44:50] I think the moment is get it all done, bring it all together, and have it operational for the American people. [44:56] And what is really – we are – we build safely. [45:00] The one rule is don't break the NAS. [45:03] Like, let's make sure that we keep people safe as they fly throughout the airspace. [45:07] That is our charge. [45:08] But can we build fast? [45:10] And can we do it safely? [45:11] And can we do it safely? [45:12] And I'm impressed with all of our partners and with the FAA team how incredibly quickly they're building at a juncture where, for 25 years, the FAA didn't really build. [45:24] They made promises to build. [45:27] They did studies about how they would build. [45:29] They did reports about how they would build, but they never built. [45:32] And which is why the Congress was a little more reserved about giving us the money. [45:35] We've demonstrated to them that we are doing what we say we'll do, which hopefully we now have confidence with the Congress to give us the rest of the dollars to finish the job on behalf of the American people. [45:49] We've got a quick question. [45:50] Rapid fire. [45:52] Yes. [45:59] So as I mentioned, this copper wire was being, as Brian just mentioned, discontinued. [46:06] They were taking it out of service. [46:08] So we actually had to move it from copper to fiber. [46:13] We were required to do it or it was going to be shut down. [46:16] There's more of these out there, yes. [46:19] So we're working on identifying them and switching them over. [46:25] So as Brian just mentioned, over 70% of the copper has been transitioned to fiber. [46:31] So this doesn't happen overnight. [46:48] You can't lay fiber all over the country and do that in a month. [46:53] It's going to take us time to do that, to deploy a new architecture, to have new radar. [46:59] That doesn't happen instantaneously. [47:01] But the speed that we're going is if we're going fast and we're going safely. [47:07] But to the American traveler, our number one job is their safety. [47:11] And Brian mentioned this and I've talked about this before. [47:14] We will keep you on the ground. [47:16] You won't get to your destination if we think you can't get there safely. [47:22] My first full day on the job was with the DCA air crash. [47:25] I don't want to talk to families who don't have a loved one that's going to land and get off an airplane. [47:31] That's not an experience that I ever want to have again. [47:34] My heart goes out to those families, everyone who has lost someone in aviation. [47:38] So we do everything we can to keep travelers safe. [47:41] And our airspace is safe. [47:44] I fly all the time. [47:45] My kids fly. [47:46] My wife flies. [47:47] This is a safe system, evidenced by what happened yesterday. [47:52] If there's any issue with our telecom, as mentioned, it didn't go out, but we had issues. [47:57] We shut the airspace down. [47:59] We brought airplanes in. [48:00] We landed them safely. [48:02] We figured out what was wrong. [48:03] Our systems came back online and we've gotten fully operational. [48:07] That's how seriously we take safety. [48:09] And yes, is it disruptive? [48:12] Of course. [48:14] Is it? [48:15] Games may not happen on time. [48:17] Is it today? [48:18] Saturday. [48:19] Saturday? [48:20] Saturday. [48:21] I lost track of time. [48:22] Games may not happen on time today. [48:24] People may not get to a wedding. [48:26] They may not get to a birthday party. [48:28] They may not get home from a work trip. [48:30] I want them to get home safely. [48:39] . [48:47] Many of the gates were full. [48:49] So we were bringing stairs out and getting buses and getting people off airplanes. [48:53] That way it was everyone rallied in those moments yesterday to accommodate the passengers. [49:00] We don't want to leave passengers on airplanes. [49:02] We want to get them into the terminal. [49:04] We want to, if they're not going to fly that night, try to find a place for them to sleep, [49:08] whether it's a hotel or other accommodations. [49:11] So I don't have any reports. [49:12] I don't know that you do, Brian. [49:13] But we work diligently with all of our partners, constant contact with the airlines, you know, [49:22] making this as easy as possible in a very difficult situation. [49:28] With that, I want to thank you guys. [49:32] Here's what we're going to do. [49:34] We're going to continue to give you updates as we know more. [49:37] We'll continue to give you those updates. [49:40] If it was the router, if it was L3 Harris, we'll tell you that when we know. [49:44] We're going to continue to push the Congress, answer their questions, give detailed requests [49:49] on what we want. [49:50] We're going to work across the aisle. [49:52] And at this moment, I think we're going to have a great end of the year Christmas present [49:59] for the American people, where they're going to get a big sum of money that comes to the [50:04] FAA. [50:05] And this team has been a remarkable team. [50:06] We are going to build on behalf of the American people. [50:08] We're going to deliver for the American people. [50:10] President Trump is going to deliver for the American people. [50:14] And I'm excited about what's to come in aviation, aviation safety, but also efficiency in our [50:21] airspace with less delays and cancellations. [50:23] Thank you very much.