President Donald Trump on Sunday said that Congress needs to provide more funding to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) following an outage that on Friday that snarled airline traffic over the weekend.
“If Congress approves the desperately needed money for Air Traffic Control, we can get it built quickly and efficiently,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social. “It will be the BEST SYSTEM anywhere in the World. Much of our current air control system is 50 years old – RIDICULOUS!”
In another post, Trump said that his administration needs Congress “to give the money” to the FAA “FAST!”
“We have the knowledge and plan for the Flight Control Systems,” he also wrote, adding that the “FAA is doing a great job, and is ready to go.”
The posts from Trump on Sunday are the first comments he has made about the outage, which impacted thousands of flights across the country.
Starting just before 4 p.m. on Nov. 13, the FAA announced a ground stop for all commercial airplanes in the United States. The agency canceled it at 8:15 p.m. that night.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, whose department leads the FAA, said on Friday that outdated and analog technology was to blame for the stop and added that intermittent telecom outages affected the stability of communications and radar systems used by Air Traffic Control.
“What we have is an incredibly old air traffic control system,” Duffy said, noting that he and the president have been talking about it for the past two years, and that the president had for a year been asking Congress to fund a full rebuild of the control system.
Before the ground stop was declared, FAA switches and routers “got overloaded with data” and forced the shutdown, Duffy said. “I have already replaced some of those switches with President Trump and our new IP switches did not go down,” he added. “It’s the old hardware that went down.”
Also on Sunday, Trump criticized the previous administration, writing on Truth Social that “big money” that was allocated to the federal government was “spent unwisely,” making “an old and broken system worse than when they began.”
In 2021, President Joe Biden signed into law a massive infrastructure bill, which set aside $25 billion for the FAA to improve airports and its traffic control towers, to redevelop airport terminals, and to “upgrade the foundation” of the air traffic control system, according to the FAA.
A group of Canadians decided to rent a car and embark on a 30-hour journey up north after the FAA issued a ground stop when they were at the Nashville International Airport. (Jacki Thrapp/The Epoch Times).
In a post on X, Duffy said he spoke with the chief executive officer of aerospace and defense contractor L3Harris, which is also the FAA’s telecommunications infrastructure contractor. He said the company has now secured two routers in Texas and Arkansas facilities and “is now conducting deep diagnostics testing at their headquarters in Florida.”
“We have no indication of a foreign cyberattack and we will continue to investigate alongside the FBI and our federal law enforcement partners,” he wrote in a post on X on Sunday, also including an interview he gave with Fox News.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
