After facing bipartisan blowback for his Friday night remarks on the FAA flight stoppage, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy returned to the podium Saturday morning, only to be greeted by a fresh set of problems when the audio began malfunctioning.
Seconds into his press conference with FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford and acting FAA Chief Technology Officer Rebecca Guy about Friday’s four-hour flight halt, which grounded nearly 3,500 flights, the microphone began echoing.
“Good morning, everyone. I’m here with administrator of the FAA, Bryan Bedford, and our chief technology officer, Rebecca Guy. It’s her first time doing a press conference with us, so welcome, Rebecca. I just want to first start off by extending my gratitude for what happened yesterday and the amazing performance of our air traffic controllers,” Duffy said amidst mangled audio.
News outlets cut back to the studio after Duffy said he needed a moment.
“Hold on a second there. I don’t know what’s going on … I apologize for that,” he said, ironically.
When all press conference tech issues were resolved, Duffy explained that the FAA outage that grounded around 3,500 flights across the nation Friday was due to old copper communication wires becoming overloaded.
“We have old switches, old routers. We use 1980s little copper lines. It’s an old system that went down and went down everywhere. It got overloaded,” he said.
“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?” he 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,” he continued.
This was Duffy’s second press conference to cause a stir in less than 24 hours. After his Friday night briefing with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Duffy used the conference to ask for $50 billion to upgrade the nation’s aviation systems and used it as a chance to blame the Biden administration and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
“This is an emergency. This is an emergency. I want Congress to give emergency funding,” he said.
Bipartisan politicians, media pundits and social media users blasted the move as a cash grab and said it was typical to try and shift the blame instead of worrying about the American people.
You can read more reactions to Duffy’s Friday press conference below:
