Entire US flight community introduced down by ‘defective router’ as UK flights nonetheless delayed
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Planes were left stranded on the tarmac up and down the US
The US Transportation Secretary has blamed America’s ageing air traffic control system and a faulty wire router for the recent massive aviation shutdown across the country.
Speaking at a press conference today (14 November), Sec Sean Duffy explained that while performing “routine maintenance” at a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) site, a contractor was replacing old copper wire with high-tech fibre. However, for an as of yet unknown reason, this a massive surge across the whole system.
He said: “The router that was being replaced as we switched from copper to fibre started flooding other routers in our air traffic control system. Specifically, we had over 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds.
What that did was cause issues with our communications with airplanes, and it also caused some disruption to our radar feeds.”
He added that work was already being done to figure out the exact cause, saying: “What we’re working to determine is whether we had incompetence, meaning user error or installation error from L3Harris, or whether they installed a faulty router”, emphasing that they “haven’t determined what the fault was.”
He concluded “When we see that, your safety is paramount. We shut down the airspace, get you on the ground, work on isolating the problem and then open the airspace back up, which is what we did yesterday.
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