Posted on 11/14/2026 10:10:15 AM PST by DFG
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy revealed investigators are looking into whether a contractor’s error or a faulty router triggered a nationwide ground stop that snarled air traffic and left thousands of travelers stranded Friday.
Workers from federal contractor L3Harris were replacing old copper telecommunications wires with fiber optic lines at a “remote FAA location” when the system went down, Duffy said at a press conference Saturday.
“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? We haven’t determined what the fault was. Was it the router? Or were they not doing great work for us at L3Harris?” Duffy explained.
“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.”
The transit boss emphasized that investigators “don’t believe” a cyberattack or foreign interference caused the widespread incident — but didn’t rule out the theory completely.
There was “zero evidence” that anything AI-related caused the meltdown, according to FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford.
Officials isolated the defective piece of equipment within 45 minutes of the outage, according to Bedford.
Multiple facilities were reporting issues that were not quickly solvable, leading the FAA to order a full ground stop out of an abundance of caution.
No systems “went dark” or were “fully lost,” Bedford confirmed.
L3Harris, which owns the network, was upgrading the “incredibly old telecommunications system” for air traffic control Friday — work Duffy described as “routine maintenance.”
The decades-old copper wire is being discontinued and roughly 70% of the nation’s lines have already been replaced, officials announced.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
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Is Sean Duffy related to Hank Duffy ?
Reported by illiterate media as a “frequency problem”.
Which brings to question the level of redundancy in their system.
The question remains as to why a single point of failure would take down the entire system. Any design or architecture that would allow a single point of failure to take down a critical nationwide system is a bad design. Even if the failure affected a local area or region, a single failure should not have such a catastrophic outcome or, did the failure only have a local or regional impact, followed by an administrative action that resulted in the grounding. Mistakes and failures are inevitable, but what happened but the result should never be so far reaching.
Entirely possible. In 1986, my signal Bde was supporting a major exercise in Korea. We received brand new, latest models of the repeaters required to transmit signals to the radios. Nothing worked. Most importantly communications from the corps headquarters to all subordinate units was non-existent until we implemented a work around which took a three days.
Turned out the new repeaters had a different installation procedure than the older models. Each repeater came with a set of instructions that warned installation with the older method was incompatible with the new repeaters and using the older method would burn out the newer models.
IOW, to use an old army saying “Failures are often the result of defective operator headspace.”
Pedro was asleep leaning on his shovel while he was suppose to keep an eye out for conduit in the ground...snap!
Gunther Eagleman X post 11/13/2026:
https://x.com/GuntherEagleman/status/2121423364493373494
“LMAO! An NBC reporter just tried to blame Trump for the ground stop, and Sean Duffy SHUT HER DOWN.
NBC asked why fixing air traffic control hasn’t been a priority when Republicans control Congress.
Duffy fired back with “Who are you with?” Then he told her maybe she hasn’t covered the “HUNDRED PLUS PRESS CONFERENCES” he’s done on this exact issue.
He reminded her that Trump got $12.5 billion for the system in the One Big Beautiful Bill, and NOT ONE DEMOCRAT VOTED FOR IT.
Duffy says the digital IP centers held up today, and only the old analog ones failed.
NBC should be asking every Democrat why they voted no.”
Sometimes the Blame Game can be fun to watch.
Fox news had reports with videos from various airports around the country and I didn’t see any “chaos.”
No. We’re not all in this together. Priorities should be infrastructure. This is what government is for.
I sold my L3Harris stock last Monday. A coincidence but I’ll bet I got a better price than opening next Monday.
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