National security expert blasts excuses for flight shutdown: 'There are a lot of questions'
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National security expert blasts excuses for flight shutdown: ‘There are a lot of questions’

Eleon
By Eleon
November 15, 2026 2 Min Read
Comments Off on National security expert blasts excuses for flight shutdown: ‘There are a lot of questions’

A former counterterrorism and national security official who served the administrations of former Presidents Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush and Barack Obama, Clarke told CNN host Michael Smerconish on Saturday: “I think we need a much more complete explanation.” »

The Federal Aviation Administration suspended all activity in US airspace for more than four hours on Friday. Duffy blamed the problem on old FAA routers, while Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters there was “no evidence” of a cyberattack – which stunned Clarke.

“First of all, you should never rule out cybercrime until you’ve done a forensic analysis, a root cause analysis, and they haven’t had time to do that,” he said. “So saying we don’t know what it is, but it wasn’t a cyberattack, or we think it was this, but it wasn’t a cyberattack, it’s too early to say.”

Clarke continued Saturday: “The American people need an explanation and he’s just saying they were overloaded for no particular reason on a Friday afternoon when nothing special was happening…that may be true. But we need confidence in the system.”

Duffy announced earlier this week that the FAA was expanding its artificial intelligence-based SMART (or Strategic Airspace, Route, and Trajectory Management) platform, which “centralizes various data streams.”“, in a declared attempt to improve the efficiency “nationally”.

He said at the news conference that “there was no possible way” that SMART contributed to the shutdown, but only after Mullin said that Duffy and various unnamed officials were patching the FAA system with “new technology” that was “overwhelming the old system.”

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Friday’s incident came just days after a global Microsoft outage that disrupted access to email and other systems around the world. Clarke said it likely had nothing to do with the shutdown of U.S. flights, but called Friday’s news conference “the worst crisis communications news conference” he has “ever seen.”

“With the cloud, with Microsoft, you’re supposed to have backup systems,” he explained. “With this new system that they were installing on the FAA, you’re supposed to test it first, under a high load. You’re supposed to test it in a sandbox.”

He continued: “You’re not supposed to test it in real time. I find it hard to believe that they would put this in place without testing it. So yeah, there are a lot of questions.”

Watch the full “Smerconish” interview with Clarke on YouTube.

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