The root cause of the longest interruption in plane departures at U.S. airports since September 11 remains unclear after a news conference by U.S. transportation officials on Saturday.
Routers and networking equipment appear to be involved in the technological disruption that has grounded flights across the country, but the definitive cause had not been established as of Saturday afternoon.
The inability to identify the reason for the infrastructure malfunctions led the Federal Aviation Administration to take action that resulted in the grounding order, Federal Aviation Administration Administrator Bryan Bedford told reporters.
“Due to our lack of identification of the root cause, we were not willing to take any risk that this spread could result in a sensor losing connectivity with an aircraft,” he said.
“What we saw was instability. We couldn’t explain the instability,” Bedford added.
Officials on Saturday reported problems with routers and network equipment, citing products and services from Cisco And L3Harris Technologies.
“Until I can build (the new architecture), I’m stuck with L3Harris, which owns this network,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said.
In a statement on
“We support the FAA in its investigation to understand the conditions that led to the grounding of our nation’s air transportation on November 13,” the statement said. “L3Harris takes seriously the nationwide ground shutdown and its impact on travelers, airlines and air traffic operations.”
On Friday, Duffy and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin called for an airline overhaul, with Duffy asking Congress for $50 billion.
FAA Administrator Bedford said router updates are a regular affair for his agency and separate from modernization allocations.
“We’re constantly replacing 2,000, you know, Cisco 600 routers with Juniper routers, right? So this is normal stuff. This is not part of the FAA’s $12.5 billion modernization effort. So let’s not confuse those two things,” Bedford said.
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