The Department of Transportation says it wants $50 billion to replace aging technology that led to Friday’s ground stop.
In a press conference on Friday evening, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that the US has “old switches, old routers” that became overloaded with data and failed, disrupting communications at multiple air-route traffic-control centers.
“We should talk to our senators and our members of Congress to say ‘we don’t deserve this, America,'” Duffy said. “This is the greatest country — by the way, with the greatest president — let’s give the money to fix this very real problem.”
“How many times does this have to happen before Congress gives the money to fix it?” Duffy added.
During the press conference, Duffy repeatedly said the administration needs $50 billion to replace the hardware and software that has been around since the 1980s. He added that the system can no longer handle the volume of data moving through it.
“We need one complete system. We need someone to come in and build the whole system. Doing it — nickel-and-diming it together — does not work. This is what happens when that takes place,” Mullin said.
On Friday, the Federal Aviation Administration halted departures across the US as a safety precaution, while aircraft already in the air continued toward their destinations or were diverted as needed.
The ground stop was lifted around 8:15 pm ET on Friday, but the disruption left airlines scrambling to reposition planes and crews. Roughly 10,000 flights were delayed and nearly 5,000 canceled, according to Business Insider’s count.
The officials said they have seen no evidence that the failure was caused by a cyberattack or system failures linked to artificial intelligence, but added that they are still investigating the precise cause of the outage.
