“I’ve spoken with 60 air traffic controllers tonight about what Sean Duffy said at the White House today,” said one journalist. “None of them are buying what he said.”
Air traffic controllers are rejecting US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s explanation for Friday’s nationwide flight ground stop, raising questions about the Trump administration’s account of a communications failure that disrupted air travel across the United States, affecting an estimated 1.5 million travelers.
Washington Examiner homeland security reporter Anna Giaritelli told CNN’s Laura Coates during a Friday night interview that she’d spoken with 60 air traffic controllers about the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ground stop, which was just the third to ever occur.
“None of them are buying what he said,” Giaritelli said. “The controllers were saying, ‘We don’t buy that this is actually what’s happening, the reason that Sean Duffy is saying this has happened.’”
I watched the conference live. I immediately thought it was a DDoS based on his explanation.
The first reporters question was exactly this.
In the conference, he nearly called it a cyber attack on accident at one point.
So yeah, my money is on cyber attack.
As a network engineer I can’t think of a way to cause a packet storm by introducing a new router that can’t be fixed by…unplugging said router.
The only explanation I could buy involves spraying untested configs to the entire infra, which reeks of incompetence.
“The ground stop was the longest nationwide aviation shutdown in 25 years,”
What happened 25 years ago? That was uhh… 2001? What happened in… Ohhhhh. Oh yeah. Yeah I remember that.
Duffy emphatically denied that the FAA’s recent nationwide rollout of an $875 million artificial intelligence system called Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes, and Trajectories (SMART) had anything to do with Friday’s disruption, claiming that the system “is not even plugged in.”
I’m not just going to take his word for it, though. This administration has proven time and time again that they will lie, and I have no reason to believe they wouldn’t lie about this, especially since they are very protective of the AI industry and they wouldn’t want anything that would further sour public opinion of AI to get out. That doesn’t mean they are lying but it does mean I’m not going to uncritically accept their claim that SMART was not the cause.
If they were using the new SI system and not the AI system this would never have happened! /s
Duffy is a text book example of a shady looking politician.
He also sounds shady.
The guy prattled on and on about how great Trump is, then blamed trumps stacked republican congress on not funding his department, saying it was 100% the reason this happened.
Who the fuck are they even trying to convince anymore? What compete idiot believes this?
Oh God he’s got the 90’s fauxhawk haircut, he’s old enough to know better
Listening to either of these sources is like listening to competing lawyers talking about their clients. Both sides have motivation to spin the truth. Which means the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. I don’t believe it was AI. Mainly because I doubt the AI project really uses much AI in the first place. They slap AI on everything just because they think it sounds better. I don’t believe air traffic controllers are all that knowledgeable on how the network infrastructure works. So they are a worthless sourcemof opinion on this. I do believe some system couldn’t handle the busy friday network traffic. This kind of thing happens all the time during upgrades. They probably did some work mid week, changed a path for network traffic, but didn’t account for the bandwidth it would need on a friday. They probably took their numbers from the odd hours which is when they were working. With the approaching holiday, things are going to get busier. So expect more problems next weekend.
This is starting to stink of cover-up.
Now I’m wondering if this was planned.
They know it’s the last chance to dance before the new congress is seated.
A last $50BB grift on the way out. They can take it out of ICE’s budget, otherwise they can fuck off and we MUST stop this theft
You mean the guy that met his wife and called her a bitch on MTV Road Rules and then made another road rules with his family using taxpayer money is full of shit. Huh.
I hope nobody lost a loved one in this scam, this terrorism, this extortion, and gee I really hope they don’t decide to extract the ultimate price on those responsible.
Anyone with even a passing knowledge of systems knows everything out of this incompetent turd circus about the ground stop is utter bullshit.
It’s a goddamn tragedy they’re not only thus incompetent but this stupid about it.
This is how dumb America has become
The dumbing down is not in hearing what this stupid leadership is saying and portraying
The dumbing down is in the fact that the entire nation just accepts it all and does nothing.
At this point, the American government can utterly fail at doing the most basic things and the American people in general will just stand there, complain a little and take it as another normal in the USA
A few years ago if it had been a Democrat as president, the entire news cycle would have gone apeshit at even the least thing this current government has done … instead incompetency and complete stupidity is just becoming normalized now
The fault is not in the government … the fault is in the nation of people who have just become mindless zombies that really just don’t care any more
The dumbing down is in the fact that the entire nation just accepts it all and does nothing.
Not everyone is doing nothing, go ask Charlie Kirk and the United Healthcare CEO. I’m not saying sporadic killings are going to save us, but plenty are doing a lot everyday that the news will never mention. The people “doing nothing” have been beaten to submission for decades and are mostly struggling to survive, mired in endless propaganda, victim blaming wont help anything.
and the American people in general will just stand there, complain a little and take it as another normal in the USA
What part of “historic election that decimated MAGA” is that then
Or the same parties that are benefitting from this chaos and failure, own the media that isn’t blaming the current admin
At work we recently performed a forklift upgrade of a critically important system. New hardware, around 30 new servers, updated OS, new software version.
This week two different people in IT leadership reported on the effort to the entire IT department in the monthly meeting.
As a person who has been intimately involved in the project for more than a year, it was amusing to hear them get almost every detail about the project wrong. They didn’t accurately describe what was done. They didn’t report the correct reasons the upgrade happened. About the only thing they managed to get correct was the name of the application.
This is a kind of whisper-down-the-lane problem, except you have to add that at each step as the details are communicated up the chain, each person summarizes them based on their understanding and their expectation about what their direct supervisor can understand. And many of the people in that chain really have less than a basic understanding of what the system does, to say nothing of how it does it.
However, all the people in that chain do not have any real reason to lie. They aren’t trying to hide the truth or cover their asses. There are no ulterior motives involved, beyond trying to report a success. There was no massive failure of the upgrade, but even if there was, no one in our organization gets fired for an honest mistake.
Now apply that same circumstance to anything that this administration does and understand that anyone in a leadership position in President Pedo’s government got there because they are racist, sexist scum who believe more than half the citizens in this country deserve to die or they are perfectly willing to let more than half the citizens in this country die if they see some benefit to themselves. Also consider that in order to keep their job they need to at least appear to be dumb enough to not outshine the dementia-riddled moron in command.
Of course everything they said is wrong. It can’t possibly be correct.
This is a kind of whisper-down-the-lane problem, except you have to add that at each step as the details are communicated up the chain, each person summarizes them based on their understanding and their expectation about what their direct supervisor can understand. And many of the people in that chain really have less than a basic understanding of what the system does, to say nothing of how it does it.
Now, in addition to that, insert an intermediary step between each one, where a hallucination-prone AI summarizes what the previous person said.
Stick a meat proxy between each level of management and you get a perfectly cromulent steamed mutton of an explanation such as the one that was provided. This admin’s thought process is essentially boomers that are sexed up by chat bots.
Love that leadership not involved in the day to day did the department update. Not a chance we’d let the team get full credit for their hard work
One person did list the names of the people in our team who were involved in the effort.
I appreciated that, but I kind of wish they had asked us what was involved.
It’s not just the pat on the back IMO. It’s the personal development (giving a presentation in front of a big group) and giving people face time with the department / company. That’s how you promote from within the department, grow your staff and build skills
If my department wanted me to do a presentation on every upgrade I spearhead I’d quit. I work the keyboard, speeches are for management. Not everyone wants to be promoted to a suit.
Opportunity, not compulsion
I’m not disagreeing with you, but if the person most critical to the effort (and most deserving of recognition) heard you suggest that she should have been given the opportunity to present the changes, she might hunt you down and kill you. In a violent and gruesome manner.
I like her. She sounds like a kindred spirit.
Future team lead energy right there, and she sounds like she should be voluntold to present on a semi regular basis.
Ultimately you can’t force someone to take the path they don’t want to take.
Particularly since what she does she could do for anyone, and we need her to do it for us.
Murikkkans, lolololololololololololol!
So what really happened? It sounds like it’s what we all suspected and it’s the rollout of the AI.
None of them are buying what he said because they said these types of switches that the FAA is doing, they don’t happen during the day, they don’t happen during busy times like a Friday afternoon. They’re doing these midweek, middle of the night when there is no air traffic going on.
Duffy threw around several technical terms in the press conference, but never pinpointed the actual problem. As a telecom professional, nobody swaps out routers and switches in the middle of the day. New hardware goes in ahead of an overnight migration, or old gear gets decommissioned and someone pulls the live equipment by mistake. Based on what the article describes, this looks like a stunt to shake loose more money without oversight.
Yeah, I’ve been a tech turned network engineer in the telecom space for almost 20 years now. When he kept calling TDM analog, my bullshit meter pegged. I still haven’t heard a reason as to why, if this was a TDM equipment issue, it wasn’t highly localized, IE not shit your pants and shutdown the entire US airspace. I would expect that would be last mile, but without specifics, I couldn’t say with certainty. Just the fact that he kept talking about copper lines really narrows the distances we are talking about here. It just isn’t passing the smell test for me.
To me, lt felt like he was describing a routing loop consuming all available bandwidth, and nobody knew how to fix it.
It also doesn’t make sense because anything this important is fully redundant. There is no fucking way switching over a switch/router from copper to fiber should include any downtime in a datacenter as important as the FAA communication/radar equipment.
A lot of old stuff was working plenty fine before. This is likely the administration following project 2025. They are purposefully making shit fail, “starve the beast” typeshit. So they can enrich the companies and corporations they’ve invested into. They are likely trying to privatize the air traffic controller and communications aspects of the aviation industry right now. I suggest looking up Pages 632-634 of Project 2025.
For those who don’t want to go to The Heritage Foundation’s website, here’s the relevant text:
FEDERAL AVIATION ADMINISTRATION
With a budget of $18.6 billion requested for FY 202311 and an international regulatory footprint, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is DOT’s most visible mode. It needs reform. Air traffic control (ATC) operations account for two-thirds of FAA’s budget, and the Air Traffic Organization (ATO) is far behind its counterparts in Australia, Canada, and Western Europe in implementing 21st century technology. The FAA’s primary mission is ATC; its two smaller functions are distributing federal airport grants and regulating all aspects of aviation safety.
The FAA was once considered the world’s best government aviation agency. Those days are long past. In the more than five decades since 1958 when the Federal Aviation Agency (precursor to the Federal Aviation Administration) was formed, there have been notable developments in air traffic control technology, aircraft avionics, and engine reliability, but despite many well-intentioned attempts, there have been few changes in the FAA’s funding structure. The FAA is still improperly organized and financed, and the management reforms provided in the late 1990s remain largely unused.
The FAA is 10 years older than DOT. It provides two separate and functionally different services: the world’s largest and most complex Air Navigation Service Provider (ANSP) and, at the same time, the world’s largest civil aviation regulatory and certificatory agency. The first is a 24/7/365 air traffic service provider. The second is an inherently governmental organization responsible for ensuring that aerospace operators, vehicles, airports, and ANSPs are properly certified and follow all FAA regulations. These two different organizations ought to run separately.
The FAA is the only modern Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) in the world that does not assess fees for its services. Its funding structure, subject to the annual appropriations process, stifles efficiency and innovation—and the FAA does not innovate well. It spends too much time and money on research and development (R&D) and is not very good at either one. It should get out of the R&D business and focus on testing, evaluating, and certifying private-sector innovation much more quickly than it does today.
The FAA workforce needs to modernize. The agency needs safety and certification experts, not professional airframe and powerplant mechanics (A&Ps). It needs to hire people trained to oversee mechanics, engineers, and pilots. It is time to consider promoting the FAA’s top executive team from within and requiring strict professional requirements for its top appointees. Organizations such as the FAA whose sole responsibility is public safety should be fully auditable and led by experts in their field or industry with oversight from DOT leadership.
For 60 years, the FAA was the global leader in aerospace, from general aviation to commercial space, but the U.S. lead has vanished. The FAA’s overly bureaucratic, legalistic, byzantine, and more recently hyperpoliticized way of processing regulations, adopting innovation, publishing rules, and procuring new technologies has been eclipsed by foreign CAAs and ANSPs that are eagerly certifying drones and creating environments in which new technologies and new entrants, such as air taxis, can thrive. To regain America’s global leadership in aviation, the next Administration should:
- Separate the FAA from DOT or, at a minimum, separate the ATO from the FAA.
- Completely restructure the FAA’s funding system so that the nation’s aviation system is not held prisoner to annual appropriations or used as a political football to solve nonaviation problems.
- Require the FAA to operate more like a business. The FAA has not made good use of the unique authority it has been given in areas like personnel and acquisition.
In Europe, conventional control towers are being replaced by digital/remote towers with high-resolution cameras and other sensors on tall structures and at points adjoining runways. In Germany and Scandinavia, as many as 15 small airports can be controlled from one remote tower center. The FAA has yet to certify a single digital/remote tower.
Text messaging between controllers and pilots is widespread over the oceans. The ATO began to implement what is now called DataComm in 2002 but suspended the project in 2003. This was restarted at airport control towers in 2016, but as of October 2022, it was available in only seven of the 20 high-altitude control centers.
Current technology enables flights to be managed “anywhere from anywhere,” but the ATO resists consolidating its 20 aging centers into a much smaller number—and lacks the funds to consolidate them. The FAA as regulator and the ATO as traffic manager have no plans in place to handle millions of drones and other emerging technologies such as electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft.
These shortcomings have been documented over many decades by the Government Accountability Office and DOT Inspector General. One peer-reviewed study for the Hudson Institute by scholar Robert Poole identified the ATO’s underlying problems as including an overly cautious culture, a growing lack of technological and managerial expertise, the inability to finance major capital projects with revenue bonds, and overdependence on aerospace/defense contractors.
All of these problems are interrelated. Because of the ATO’s lack of top-notch engineers and program managers, it has become dependent on aerospace contractors, unlike counterparts in Canada and the United Kingdom. Operating within the constraints imposed by the annual congressional appropriations process—and with no bonding authority—the ATO is forced to implement major projects piecemeal over many years. The ATO’s overly cautious culture appears to stem from its being embedded in a safety regulatory agency rather than being regulated at arm’s length (as are airlines and airports).
Three organizational changes, all requiring legislation, offer the likelihood of dealing with these problems based on the experiences of air traffic providers in Canada and Europe. They could be implemented one at a time or together.
- Separate the ATO from the FAA and relocate it to separate headquarters outside the District of Columbia.
- Shift from aviation user taxes to fees for air traffic services paid directly to the ATO.
- Allow the ATO to issue long-term revenue bonds for major projects.
Shorter-term reforms could include implementing user fees for unconventional airspace users (for example, advanced air mobility, space launch, and recovery) and giving the ATO a deadline after which it could not authorize or fund any more nondigital/remote control towers. These reforms would also require legislation.
Believe it or not those communications lines they are on are singular, there is not redundancy. Yes, it’s that stupid, they’ve been that stupid about it. Other things may have happened and they may be lying, but there is only one system of communications lines.
Source: your ass.
I work with the US government. So, on one hand that wouldn’t surprise me. But on the other hand for something this important they often have really strict rules and I would need some actual evidence to trust you. Tech debt in these government agencies is insane and it wouldn’t surprise me too much if they just had an ancient system that doesn’t support redundancy or something like that.
I remember I had a friend who worked for the DOJ in like 2010 and told me they didn’t have the technology to print more than one page at a time lol. So yeah I wouldn’t be surprised, especially with something so critical where they’re not going to want to switch over when it could cause issues like this.
Citation needed, my experience tells me otherwise
Duffy is now demanding Congress give him another 50 billion in additional emergency funding without saying what it’s being used for.
That’s a lot of reasons.
It’s possible these 60 experienced Air Traffic Controllers are competent, though, and can’t relate to the shitty people who make bad decisions who are in charge right now
My experience with controllers is that they know their job extremely well, but often make confident assertions about the software that they use that have no basis in reality.
It’s also possible that there’s a bunch of terminology that’s being slung around inexactly. Non-technical people are hearing “switch,” for example, and are all hearing different things. Even me, a fairly technical person that runs a home network, am not familiar with enterprise-level switch technology and all its intricacies. My assumptions on hearing Duffy’s explainations are different than an expert’s and a laymen’s.
When he says switch, he almost certainly means router, as most enterprise routers provide integrated layer 3 and layer 3 functionality
My guess is that they created a routing loop in the core network which ate up all available bandwidth.
“these types of switches that the FAA is doing, they don’t happen during the day” This is very confusingly worded. Switches to what? From what? Wasn’t Duffy talking about “switches and routers” as in the network devices? Not “switches” as an action.
Could be the switches from copper lines to fiber line
probably, but it’s weird wording, and not what Duffy was saying. I still think Duffy was talking bullshit, but this is not a counterargument.
Project 2025 (pages 632-633) is what happened, as executed by de facto President Stephen Miller. It’s a fascist scam to help the crooks to further enrich themselves at taxpayers’ and flying customers’ expense. More corruption from a silent, incompetent, corrupt Trumpepstein.
Project 2025 You’ll have to manually type in the page number or scroll for days.
Naah, search for faa. I think it’s the 3rd one?
The first one is a different FAA entirely, which is wonderful because they have no naming standard for acronyms.
Depends on who is running it.
the dems lie too, they just have illicit affairs with adults and steal money slightly less egregiously. sometimes they fill in a pothole.
it is better, but they’re not more honest.
Nonsense. There is such a thing as good government. Conservatives don’t even believe it is a thing, and it’s become common currency to badmouth all of government, but I reject that kind of nihilism.
As the author of Blockers as pointed out, sure, people like to say they don’t trust government, but by their actions, they prove that they actually do trust government when they expect that the food has been inspected, that their water meets regulations, that airplanes have a great safety track record, that cars have to meet standards, and so on…
I didn’t say there’s no such thing as good government. I don’t believe I weight in on the topic. I said we moved from howling fascist gigapedos to cryptofascist sex pests in charge of ours, and this while an improvement, is insufficient.
in the future please relate whatever you’re saying in reply to my comment to some shit I said please.
