Nationwide Ground Stop Lifted by FAA 

0:00Every day, animals across the country face abuse and neglect. And every day, the ASPCA shows up to rescue animals in crisis. But they can't do it alone. Visit ASPCA.org slash need. Become a donor today to provide the care and shelter these animals urgently need. And for a limited time, the ASPCA will send you a free gift as a special thank you. Visit ASPCA.org slash need. This is CNN Breaking News. Well, as you know, for only the second time since 9-11, the FAA grounds each and every departing plane at every airport nationwide after communications meltdown leaves thousands of flights already airborne, unable to talk to air traffic control.

0:49Good evening. Thanks for joining us. And as those airborne flights make their way into airports already clogged with grounded planes and angry passengers, we're starting to get the beginnings of a picture of what happened. what might have caused it. We are also waiting to hear any minute now from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and DHS Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen at the White House. Their cameras are already in position there. We are just waiting for them, and that could happen any second now. Here's what it looks like at the worst of it. According to the tracking site FlightRadar24, a little more than 4 ,000 flights were in the air when the FAA ordered the stoppage around 4 this afternoon.

1:27The reason problems at the 22 long distance flight control centers across the country, which handle jet flights at or above 18 ,000 feet. You see them outlined in red on the map. They were unable to talk with those planes, again, thousands of them, as they made their way to their destinations. Now, some of the crews and some of those planes had to resort to using the international emergency radio frequency to talk to one another and keep themselves separated from one another. Right now, FlightAware reports over 5 ,000 flights cancellations and over 9 ,800 delays. Just a short time ago, an airline source told CNN's Pete Mantine that the FAA has told them that this all was caused by a problem with computer network routers.

2:11The issue, according to this source, is believed to have originated at Chicago's Midway Airport, then cascaded nationwide. earlier you see him there DHS Secretary Mullen said that there was no indication this was the result of anything nefarious. Just to make sure we understand there is no indication and we had no reason to believe that as of right now that this was a threat to the United States. This was a telecommunication outage throughout FAA out of abundant caution. We have grounded all the flights and all the flights are accounted for as incoming flights, either internationally or the flights that are currently still in the air.

2:55I will repeat myself, there was no prior indication, there was no indication as of yet that this was an nefarious attack against us. It's just a telecommunication outage as of right now. We expect to hear from him, as I said, any moment. And fortunately so far, nothing has gone dangerously wrong as flights continue landing. In the map of U.S. airspace, you see they're starting to empty out. Pilots are trained for this sort of thing. Even student pilots like this one on his first solo flight. Listen. Alpha Meacham Tower, there is a ground stop nationwide. I advise you land your aircraft. Where would you like to land?

3:35Ma 'am, I'm a student pilot. Honestly, this is my time of time doing solo. Come on, can't wait. And I don't know what to do. You can imagine what that's like. Again, we are waiting to hear from federal officials, and we have reporters across the country, along with aviation security experts across the board, starting with CNN's Pete Mantine in San Francisco. Pete, as we await this press conference, I understand you have some reporting the outages, the result of an issue with network routers possibly originating at Chicago's Midway. What have you learned? Possible network routers, according to an airline source that has been briefed by the Federal Aviation Administration, which had a trickle-down effect apparently on both telecommunications lines and radio frequencies at air traffic control centers.

4:20Those are the facilities, 22 of them nationwide, responsible for aircraft at their cruising altitudes in route centers, meaning not airplanes on approach, not airplanes recently departed, planes when they are in the air at high altitude, sort of a linchpin in the system. When you don't have those, the entire system comes tumbling down. Those telecom issues also carry, in some cases, the radar scope picture that air traffic controllers rely on in order to see the airplanes in their airspace. I'm also learning this now, that airports are now running out of space because of this nationwide ground stop that has been in place since about 4 or 3 o 'clock Eastern time.

5:05Reagan National Airport is now officially running out of space to the point that the FAA has put out an alert saying the airport can accept no more flight diversions, meaning no more flights that were not planned to land at DCA because of this ground stop. This is huge. And right now, the analysis from airline analytics firm Sirium, the new numbers say there were about 11 ,000 flights slated to depart today. When this ground stop went into place, that means about 1.5 million passengers have been stranded by the nationwide airspace system now in complete meltdown mode. We will hear from Secretary Mullen and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy soon about what the plan is going forward, because we know that airlines, they tell me that they are considering essentially stopping all flights for the remainder of tonight.

6:01Probably a smart move because there is really no place for planes to go. So many planes and crews out of position. Not many options for airlines, but for them to unplug and plug their systems back in in hopes of getting on the right foot tomorrow. The other nationwide ground stops, 9-11 is a separate case. The nationwide ground stop of January 11th, 2023, that lasted only a few hours and it pales in comparison to what we are seeing here. This will likely mean that no flights out tonight from the United States except the ones that we have been seeing leaving on international flights. Essentially, aero traffic controllers can tell the pilots, here's your heading, talk to international air traffic control, and you're on your way because the FAA can't help you here.

6:50This is a huge failure of the nationwide airspace system, which is predicated in some cases on copper wire old technology from the 1940s in some cases. And the Trump administration has been pushing for 30 billion more dollars to try and overhaul the nation's air traffic control system. We will see if those calls get louder after this meltdown is come and gone. But we are not out of the woods yet. Anderson. Pete, obviously, for anybody who's watching, if they have a flight tonight, they should not head to the airport. I mean, at this point, anywhere, it would seem pretty safe to say there's not going to be flights.

7:29And I guess if they have flights tomorrow, they should wait and see what the situation is when they wake up in the morning. Obviously, you know, officials have not put a time frame on how long this could last. But this doesn't sound like it's going to be something that's going to be solved in the next hour or so. I would say if you are at an airport waiting, you may want to try and rebook on the first flight tomorrow if you can. That's what I've been telling folks who've been blowing up my phone since about 4 p.m. Eastern time today, trying to figure out exactly what to do. You may want to go to a hotel.

8:04You may want to find a train. You may want to find a rental car. But we're hearing that so many of those facilities are already sold out of alternate means of transportation. Doesn't seem that tomorrow will be smooth sailing. It'll probably be a bit bumpy as airlines try to figure out what to do. They are solely focused, according to the airlines, on trying to get 100 percent of these people to where they need to go. But they want to do it safely. So much better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air than in the air wishing you were on the ground. It is so much safer, too. And that's why the Federal Aviation Administration is doing this.

8:39Right. So, Pete, for folks who are on the tarmacs on planes that have landed, how long? I mean, there's a lot of people have been sitting on these planes for a while. what is the process for getting people off the planes that have already been grounded? In some cases, it will be a Herculean effort by the ground crews. And the problem is that airports are running out of gates to put planes in. I mean, think about how many times you've been on a commercial flight and it's landed early and the gate's not ready. And that's the situation that's happening here in huge numbers. And so they'll need to get stair cars.

9:13They'll need to get people off of planes parked out on what are called hard stands, meaning like far out on the ramp, not the typical gate. It's going to be tricky. And in some cases, planes have diverted to airports that are now overwhelmed. And so the good news is there are Department of Transportation rules that make it so that the airlines have to let you off after a certain number of hours. But in this case, it's an extraordinary circumstance. So the hope is that the airlines will be able to get the right resources in the right places at the right time. They're going to be paying a lot of overtime tonight.

9:48And we have seen in recent minutes some planes, not many, but some at East Coast airports taking off. Are those international flights that are getting out of U.S. airspace quickly? Presumably international flights, because there's no way that you can saturate an air traffic control facility right now that has no radio or no radar in some cases, at least that's what we're hearing. So essentially the controllers are saying hey if you're going to Europe here's your heading 090 eastbound climb to 18 ,000 bye That's the simple version of it And so if those flights can get out and often those planes are huge wide-body planes with a couple hundred people Waiting to get to where they're going That's probably the best thing to do And frankly it also siphons off some of the stress on the air traffic control system or the airport system rather on the ground Get a plane off the ground and into the air and get to where it needs to go rather than keep it on the ground and tie up a gate may be the best move for the airline as they try to consider how essentially to get back to normal it will not be easygoing.

10:49Yeah, Pete, stay with us. Again, we're waiting for this press conference to see that in the lower part of your screen. We are joined by my panel for the hour, CNN aviation analyst Miles O 'Brien, also CNN business editor at large Richard Quest is with me, former air traffic control specialist S. Todd Urey and retired FBI Special Agent Richard Kolko, who is a retired U.S. Navy pilot. Yeah, well, let me start off. Todd, let me start with you. Flights were still in the air when this ground stop was issued. How are air traffic controllers able to communicate with those pilots during all of this? Well, there are a couple of ways that we do that.

11:28It's a bit of redundancy some of its coordination by agreement if you don't have radio communications with an aircraft there are certain procedures that the crew will know to follow and the controllers will know to follow up sometimes it's as simple as picking up the phone at the desk where the supervisor is and coordinating with their dispatch and so depending on what the scenario was at the time and what the impact was at a particular facility then there are a number of different methods you could use. Sometimes if you have communication on one frequency through a crew, you can relay an instruction from a controller to a pilot, then from pilot to pilot, to make sure that you keep the system moving.

12:11But that's why the ground stop went into effect, so that you didn't continue adding pressure to a system that was already overwhelmed the minute the system started shutting down. And Richard Kolko, as we mentioned, And your retired Navy pilot, in addition to your FBI background, what did you take away from Secretary Mullen's earlier remarks? And again, we're waiting to hear from him any moment for an update. What stands out to you about this ground stoppage?

12:41Yeah, I'm sorry, we're not hearing Richard. Richard Quest, what do you have? I mean, what is the equivalent of this in terms of what we've seen? Oh, we haven't seen one. I mean, there isn't. There's nothing like this. 9-11, obviously. 9-11, yes, but 9-11, the whole thing shut down for a period of time. We've not seen anything on this scale. And I think you're going to really discover that over the weekend. I think that Pete was being charitable. About that morning flight. Well, no, no, he's right. He's right. Keep booking yourself. Because what you don't want to do is not be on a flight when it's a booking.

13:14The existing flights, if they take off, they will take off. So you should book yourself on an existing flight. Correct, because tomorrow's flights have got passengers already booked on it. And they're not going to kick those passengers off. You're at the back of the queue. And that's the significance of just keep rebooking, rebooking, rebooking. What you don't want to do is be the person who has to wait to find. By the way, this is from a man who has spent his life in airports. Well, the fundamental rule I followed, when things go wrong, to use a polite expression, is you're on your own. Yes. You're on, you know this.

13:47if you've travelled as much time. You're on your own, you sort your own, you have to call yourself. By the way, I've just had a text from a senior executive at Lufthansa. They are getting out flights barely from East Coast airports where they can get them out because they're straight into international traffic. Same I've heard from Asian Airlines on the West Coast. You can take off, you can get straight out and be on the way. But this is tiny stuff compared to the U.S. domestic network. It's going to be days, if not a week, before we're seeing even a semblance of normality here. I don't want to be a complete Jeremiah on a Friday, but the reality is this is a collapse of the U.S.

14:32aviation system. And you're not going to be able to put it back. Humpty Dumpty is not going back together again overnight. Right. Miles, the Trump administration has been trying to update the aging air traffic and control system, which uses in some cases 1940s technology. Pete Mantine was on the air earlier saying only this week the FAA announced they'd be phasing out floppy disks. Was an outage like this only a matter of time, you think? Well, Anderson, if you go from floppy disks to imagining AI, you're missing a few steps along the way, right? It's like bolting a rocket ship to a horse and buggy.

15:08That's not going to go well for the horse. So this is a scenario where you have to move so delicately as you transform and modernize a system that is just baling wire and duct tape. And while there are redundancies built into it, when you have just tiny little copper wires connecting these systems and you start imagining the bandwidth required for artificial intelligence carried over those same tiny little copper wires, you can see how things fall down pretty quickly. So there's not only needs to be redundancy in the system, there needs to be redundancy in the upgrade to the system in order to protect it.

15:50And I think we've seen here how fragile the whole thing is. We can only be thankful that it has failed safe. It could have been a very catastrophic day if it weren't for the heroic actions of the flight crews and the air traffic controllers battling this old system. Pete Muntean, what are you hearing from people in airports? What kind of stories have you been hearing about where people are at right now? I can do you one better. I can tell you about what the pilots are hearing on the radio. And in some cases, they're having to revert to the emergency radio frequency. It's called Guard 1215. If you're familiar with boats, it's like Channel 16 on a boat.

16:36It's essentially the open frequency that's supposed to only be used for emergency communication. It's the way that air traffic controllers can find a pilot who's lost in the tubes, wayward on radio frequencies, trying to find them. In some cases, they've been using this emergency frequency to essentially get planes to where they needed to go because of this frequency widespread outage at these air route traffic control centers, which are so critical, responsible for tens of thousands of miles of airspace. I've also heard from controllers at these centers, and one said it's a hot mess, to put it bluntly.

17:18They did not even know the full scope of this problem as it was trickling throughout the air traffic control system nationwide. It wasn't clear to controllers in one facility that another facility was having the same problem. because remember telecommunications which we're talking about this type of outage is so crucial to how air traffic control facilities communicate facility to facility in some cases and very often actually not just some cases many cases they're using landline telephones to coordinate the handoff of one plane from one facility to the next these facilities use paper strips in some cases or many cases to keep track of which plane is where and where it's going.

18:05Controllers hand them off physically to one another. That's being replaced by a digital system. So this is really a system that has been built up on older technology that's aging rapidly. And now it is catching up with the Federal Aviation Administration. Miles mentioned earlier floppy disks. Just last week, the federal aviation administration said they were beginning to phase out floppy disks in favor of cd-roms not some huge technological leap that they were making here uh we're talking about going from 1989 technology to 1995 technology uh so there seems to be can they get Just this huge intersection that it's a great question.

18:53And OK, so we have heard from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, FAA Administrator Brian Bedford. They love to hold up floppy disks and paper strips at press conferences talking about the need to modernize air traffic control. Twelve and a half billion dollars was authorized by Congress for that. Duffy wants another 30 billion dollars. The Trump administration wants another 30 billion dollars to continue to modernize air traffic control. Talked to him this week. He said there's still work that needs to be done. In some cases, the FAA is going to eBay, they say, to find old relic computers that you can't buy anywhere else to run their systems.

19:30It's what we saw during the nationwide airspace shutdown of January 11th, 2023. When that system of update was pushed on that system, there wasn't a reliable backup. That caused the NOTAM system to fail. That's so critical for pilots to get the little addendums that they need in order to fly. You can't fly legally without checking NOTAMs. It's things like airport closures and runway closures and taxiways and lighting systems. Really critical kind of stuff. And so without that, they had to shut down the airspace system. But that was only a few hours and primarily overnight into the morning time.

20:04So there was some time for the air traffic control system and the airlines to catch up. In this case, we are now hearing of airlines completely scrapping their schedules for the rest of the night. We just heard from JetBlue Airways, huge on the East Coast, New York, Boston, to Florida, to Puerto Rico and the Caribbean and beyond. They are stopping all operations for tonight. No more JetBlue flights tonight. You can bet that that is the first of many announcements that we will see from the larger airlines tonight, especially those on the East Coast. The Northeast corridor is so critical for air travel.

20:38It's the most hugely trafficked area of air traffic in the country. That is not going well, A, to begin with, and B, not easy to turn back on. So the airlines are going to be scrapping their schedules. You can bet on it. Probably best to book a flight for tomorrow or beyond. If you have a flight tonight, you're probably not getting out. Yeah, and as I said, we are awaiting this latest update from both Mullen and Sean Duffy. It was supposed to be close to the top of the hour. It seems to be delayed. I'm sure everybody is scrambling on this. Let's check in with Shimon Prokipas, who is at Newark Airport.

21:17Shimon, what have you been seeing this evening? So, Anderson, here at Newark now, there's a little bit of chaos because not only have many of the people been spending hours on planes here, trying to get out, then having to get off their flights, now they're spending hours trying to find their luggage. Let's show Anderson here all of the luggage here. Anderson. This is what people have now been looking for. In some cases, they were on the plane for hours, two hours, and now they come down and now they are looking for their luggage. And it's all across, Steve, let's walk this way. It's all across here.

21:50It goes all the way over to this way as well, where there are people who are literally just standing around waiting for luggage. It's not really any kind of organized effort here by any of the staff members here. There aren't even that many of the airport employees here that are helping. So what I've been seeing here is many of the passengers have actually been pulling the luggage themselves off the carousel to make room for other luggage in hopes that they could possibly get to their luggage. How long have you been waiting, sir? Actually, I was on the tarmac for the last three hours. I just came from Phoenix.

22:25You came from Phoenix. So you actually arrived? I arrived, yes. So we're waiting here three hours. But thank God we landed. And how long have you been waiting for your luggage? Just now and honestly just five minutes right now. Five minutes, so you're still waiting for it. Still waiting for it, exactly. But you were able to take off, you arrived. Right, so we were in takeoff in Phoenix, arrived here without any problems, but we were waiting for over three hours. Three hours. So you're one of the first people that I spoke to that actually was able to make their way in here. Some of the other people obviously that we've been talking to here, Anderson, were waiting, were hoping that they'd be able to take off.

22:58That didn't happen. And now they're here and they're being told, they're making some announcements here, trying to help people find their luggage. United Airlines here at Newark did make an announcement around 7 o 'clock or so that all flights were canceled. So we're downstairs at the arrivals and upstairs, obviously, is where the departures are. People were still showing up, but they were starting to leave. They're like, okay, we're not going to risk it. And they started leaving. But this is pretty chaotic down here at this hour, Anderson. Shimon, thanks. I want to go over to our national correspondent, Nick Watt, at LAX in Los Angeles.

23:37Nick, what is it like there? Well, people are leaving. There was a whole school group that were trying to get to Denver. We've been chatting to them. They finally pulled the plug. They're going for a hotel. Beginning to hear a little bit of people saying we're not being told all the information, a little conspiracy vibe. Another man came up to this board, which still says, you know, now it's 7.04. And he just said, that's BS and walked off in a huff. Now, Pete just mentioned that JetBlue said no more flights. That's the JetBlue line here. It is massive. And I don't know if these people know that there are apparently no more JetBlue flights tonight.

24:13Now, we've also spoken to people who are trying to drive. I saw one couple having an argument. The guy was just going, honey, it's 22 hours. Another couple who were about the most sanguine of anybody who I've spoken to, they said, we're college kids. We've got nowhere to go. We're chill. They tried to rent a car to drive to Idaho, couldn't find a rental car within 50 miles. This airport, Anderson, usually 200 ,000 people pass through this every day. That is not happening today. The atmosphere has been chill. I'll give you one good news story. A friend of mine was on a flight from Seattle. Luckily for him, it had taken off before this happened.

24:49It landed. They were stuck on the tarmac, as Pete was saying. There is a gridlock. So they were stuck in the tarmac waiting for a gate to open up because planes weren't taken off. So the gates were not getting freed. Anyway, he is back. He is through. Massive line for cabs. But he is on his way home. One good news story. Many, many millions of terrible news stories of people who are desperately trying to figure out how are we going to do this. I spoke to one lady who was walking out trying to get back to Georgia. I said, are you going to try tomorrow? Orange said, honey, we're going to go Sunday.

25:21So some people deciding just to really give this a good day plus for this to clear. But there's going to be a lot of people sleeping on the floor of this airport tonight. Anderson. All right. Thank you, honey. Appreciate it. Back now with our panel. What a mess. Miles, in the shots at the airport, I mean, it still seems full of people. Realistically, I mean, none of those flights are taken off in the next few hours. No, no. As a seasoned traveler, and I'm sure you can relate to this, I would flee the airport as quickly as possible and maybe not go for the 22-hour drive, but maybe a modification of the plans if you can do it.

26:06I mean, clearly, you know, there are people who are on their way to weddings and funerals and things they need to be at. And this is a terribly unfortunate thing in those circumstances. But if you have the option and honestly, even if you have to be somewhere specifically, you're not really going to make much headway staying at the airport. If you can get out of there, I get out of there. Richard Kress, do you have a sense of what the, I mean, the FAA, obviously we've seen, you know, a lot of problems with people leaving government. You know, Sean Duffy, I'm not totally familiar with his background other than his work at MTV, but I don't know that he's an aviation expert.

26:50Is there the, has there been a drain at the FAA of expertise? Obviously, we know air traffic controllers have had issues. If we take, I mean, air traffic controllers, you can go back to Reagan when you find them. But in terms of Doge and the FAA, yeah, you could say there's been problems here, but that's not really what this is about. The U.S. has been trying to modernize the air traffic control system for at least the last 30 years. And it's so hard to do because... It's hard to do, A, to get the appropriation of the money. B, once you've got the appropriation, to get the programs efficiently put in place and executed.

27:32There have been some incredible stories of wastage, time lost and all of those things. The next gen operation of reforming has taken decades to put in place. And now, of course, the changes are happening faster than the government and the FAA can put them in place. All right, we're going to take a quick break as we wait to hear from the Transportation and Department of Homeland Security secretaries. We'll be right back.

27:59I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, host of the Chasing Life podcast. We get to talk to the men's winner of the New York City Marathon, Andreas Almgren. He's a self-coached 31-year-old who was, get this, making his marathon debut. He never ran a marathon before he won it. If someone wanted to start getting serious about running, and they wanted to approach it like a data scientist like you do, how would you suggest they start? Be patient. My peak weeks, I ran like 140, 150 miles per week or something. Wow. Either increase the distance, or you should increase the intensity. You should never increase both at the same time.

28:38Listen to Chasing Life, streaming now, wherever you get your podcasts.

28:45And welcome back to our continuing coverage of this breaking news. We're looking at the White House briefing room. We are expecting to hear any moment now from the DHS and transportation secretaries for the latest update. Joining me now is Nicole Perlroth, who is a former journalist, The New York Times, and an expert in cybersecurity. Nicole, we don't know, obviously, exactly what is causing this outage, but as you and other experts have said, that the air traffic control networks have been at the top of the warning list for possible oh we don't have her yet let's go back to come back here to uh to richard quest i was just looking so the way the air traffic control system has been modernized in this country over the last 30 odd years it was this next gen the idea from ground radar to satellite to other forms of navigation tools next gen finished last year the current administration is asking for 40 billion dollars for what's known as the brand new ATC system, BNATS.

29:41And that's what Sean Duffy is trying to get the money for at the moment. They're putting as much pressure as they can. Now, tonight is disastrous for air travel, but it could be just the thing that the politicians need to push this through because everybody realizes next-gen took you so far, BNATS has to take you. It's also got to be quite complicated in real time to switch over an antiquated system. Well, you know that famous phrase, it's literally true here. How do you change things when the engine... Let's go to the briefing room. Well, good to see you guys again. Welcome to Friday the 13th, right?

30:18You know, I want to make sure everybody understands that there is no connection between this and Microsoft. I know a lot of people are making that jump. This is so far what we've seen. There is actually no cyber attack. We're still working through that process. Our teams are working. This is what the leadership of President Trump looks like by the organization and the team he's put together. We're built to handle crisis like this and that's exactly what we're doing. We're moving at an unprecedented pace as a whole of government to make sure that we are doing the public justice by making sure everybody is safe, which everybody is.

31:12We are working with the airports, with the communities, with the cities, the states to make sure those passengers that may find themselves in need. FEMA has activated their centers to make sure that there's no medication that is being missed. If it is, we're going to have people for them to reach out to. The airport has got a direct number to reach out to us. We can provide that medication for them working through the state. So right now, things seem to be working, as we can say, in the right direction. As you can see to my right, I have Secretary Sean Duffy, who is here to provide the update on FEMA, where we're at and where we're going.

32:01Once Sean is completed with his update, then we will be happy to take questions from everybody. I just want to reiterate this. The public was never at danger through this process. There was never any lives at risk. There was no flights at risk. FAA was able to handle it. We did it out of an abundant of caution. But I do understand the Internet traffic and where all these conspiracies start running towards. I just can't say this enough. All your loved ones are safe. We are working to resolve the issue, and we hope to have operations up and going normal at some point. So with that, I'll turn it over to Secretary Duffy.

32:51Thank you, Mark Wayne, and good night to everybody. First, I want to thank you for your partnership and assistance. Mark Wayne has been great. Stephen Miller put together all of the intelligence assets of the White House. We were in multiple times talking to the President about what was happening in the airspace. Complete engagement by President Trump's team. So just I want to walk through what happened today. So at 3.36 p.m., we experienced instability for our radar and our communications and our centers and our TRACONs across the country. So if you don't know this, at airports we have towers.

33:30The next rung out is a TRACON. After that, we have en route centers. The TRACONs and the centers, we started to have inconsistency in the data from the radars and our communication with airplanes. And we have procedures for this. Our pilots are well-trained. Our air traffic controllers are well-trained. And at that point, we issued a ground stop. We had over 3 ,500 airplanes in the air. They all engaged. And last time I looked, we had less than 400 in the airspace. as they were all coming in to safely land, and we navigated it with our well-known procedures that we have when these incidents happen.

34:10I'm going to talk about where we're at now, but before I do that, when we shut down the airspace, oftentimes there are critical movements that have to take place, whether it's medevac, there's cargo operations that are moving critical medicines that save people's lives. We didn't lose all telecom. We didn't lose all radar, but that instability, because of abundance of caution and making sure we keep the American flyer safe, we did the ground stop. But we were going to allow those life-saving movements to still occur, as well as with law enforcement as well. So what happened? Right. I've heard a lot of the rumors like Mark Wayne has.

34:45But what we have is an incredibly old air traffic control system. I think every single one of your networks have covered the president and myself talking about this for the last two years. The president for the last year has been asking Congress to fully fund a full build of a brand new air traffic control system. So we have TDM telecom. So this is analog telecom. Our switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data and they went down. and I shouldn't say they went down. They started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers. And because of that, we shut the system down. Now, I have already replaced some of those switches with President Trump and our new IP switches did not go down.

35:34It's the old hardware that went down. And I think the question for the American people is, do you want your Congress to fund this. President Trump has asked for the money. He's asked the Congress on a bipartisan approach to say, give us the resources to build a state-of-the-art air traffic control system. Let's not do a patchwork fix to a system that's critical for every single family. It's not red, it's not blue, it's not Democrat, it's not Republican, it's American. Give us the money to fix it. Now, if you look to the past administrations, going back 25 years,$15 billion has been given to the FAA to fix this air traffic control system.

36:18And guess what? Barely anything was done. We had a down payment. President Trump asked for it in the one big, beautiful bill of$12.5 billion. We are building in that$12.5 billion. That portion of the build will be done by the time President Trump leaves office. We are moving at a speed that has never been seen before with regard to the FAA. But that's a partial funding. I think America demands that the Congress give the rest of the resources to finish the bill. And I think the Congress at a point looked to the history of the FAA and said, we don't trust you. Well, with President Trump and what we've done, I think they do trust because what we've done with that first tranche of money.

37:05And so with a brand new state of the art system, you won't have these outages. So what you experienced today, but you can think back, many of you covered the story from a year and a half ago, we had outages in Newark, multiple outages in Newark. This is a continual problem that we have and it should be fixed. And so what we want to do, I've asked, the president's asked for$30 billion. I want$50 billion dollars. And by the way, if you look at how much money congressmen, Peter, you've covered Congress, they waste a lot of money. What's more important than having an air traffic control system that actually works?

37:41And so the president said, you know what, let's finish this job. New hardware, new software, new telecommunication. Many of our towers are almost 100 years old. Our air traffic controllers have leaky roofs, air conditioning that doesn't work. They're high in the air. Their elevators don't work. Their roofs leak. I want new towers. We should also invest in many of the airports around the country that, frankly, many of them are embarrassing. Let's get the money. Let's invest so we never have to come at 8.30 at night and have a press conference on why air travel was shut down, why we have tens of thousands of people in airports separated from their families without any knowledge of where they're going to sleep tonight.

38:28Now, you probably picked up that we've identified the problem. We've got our centers and our TRACONs operational right now. And so at 8.15 tonight, Eastern time, we've opened up the airspace. Now, does that mean every flight is going to fly right now? It's going to be slow, right? So if you're watching, you're at an airport, check with your airline. It depends on do we have crews available? Do we have pilots and flight attendants available to fly your flight? We're going to try to move as many of those as we can tonight if we have the capacity with crews to move those flights. If not, we're going to start tomorrow morning with our airline partners moving those aircraft, but it's going to take us some time to unwind what's happened this afternoon.

39:14Finally with general aviation, if we have aircraft that's moving six people, that's a lower priority. But this weekend we have movements of aircraft that are general aviation that might have 60, 80, 100 people on those aircraft. We are going to give those aircraft a priority. So hopefully tomorrow we are going to start to see far better movement. But we'll take your questions. This is an emergency. This is an emergency. I want Congress to give us emergency funding. This is bipartisan. This is American. I want$50 billion. President Trump is a builder. He's going to build this network and deliver for the American people.

40:01But the president can't deliver for America unless the Congress delivers the money to make it happen. So with that, we're happy to take your questions. Peter. Secretary Duffy, what you're describing, routers overloaded with data that then start to show instability. That sounds like something that could be caused by a cyber attack. Can you say with 100 % certainty that this was not caused by a cyber attack or a rogue AI? I'm going to give this to Mark Wayne. All right. We are, there's nothing completely certain right now. It doesn't appear that way. We've activated our teams. This is what Department of Homeland Security is all about.

40:43This is why we're stood up to have the continuity of government to bring all the resources together in an emergency like this. This is exactly what this is. This is a national emergency. We have all of our assets, be it from DOW to CISA to all of our NOCs, than all the other components we have inside of the H.S. NSA is working with us. There is nothing that indicates it yet. Now, when we start looking at cyber threats, cyber attacks, typically some people is going to raise their hand up and say, hey, we did that. There's no chatter. We haven't seen any footprints, as you would say, or identifications of people that got into the system.

41:27It appears that this was mechanically driven. However, we're still looking, so we're not going to rule that out. I want to hit back on to what Secretary Duffy said with the funding. This is a national security risk. We just saw what took place when we have vulnerabilities and we have old systems. The president has declared this a national emergency, and now we have to have Congress act and fund it. This is vitally important that we get this system built. The president has said this. Secretary Duffy has said this multiple times. Our air traffic control system is outdated, and it hasn't been a priority from Congress.

42:07And so this is what happens when Congress kicks the can down the road. So when you say that you haven't seen footprints suggesting a cyber attack, and nobody's taking credit for a cyber attack, have you seen any evidence specifically? Can you tell people who are watching? No. We have seen zero evidence. We've seen zero evidence that this was a cyber attack or SI attack. So then it must be something else. What is the other thing? What caused the instability? So it's very easy. We have old switches, old routers. We use 1980s little copper lines. It's an old system that went down and went down everywhere.

42:53It got overloaded. So right now we've opened up the airspace. We've got our centers and our TRACONs operational. It would be much, and I don't want to rule out that we didn't have nefarious activity here. That's Mark Wayne and the cybersecurity team that works with us. We were able to deploy fixes to reduce the overloading on our switches that were able to bring the networks back online and our TRACONs and our centers back online. So I think our fix gives us a pretty good indication that it was a legacy network problem that went down. And by the way, all of the new equipment that we put in, none of that went down.

43:38This is all the old legacy equipment that's existed forever. By the way, none of your networks run on 1980 technology. You all got fiber, state-of-the-art, high-speed networks that cover all of your stations, but not the FAA. I think the American people deserve the same kind of network that you all use, the same kind of connectivity and speed that you all use. That's what we're asking the Congress to give us. Thank you, Mr. Secretary. One question for each of you. Mr. Mullen, are you able to completely rule out forward interference? And then, Mr. Duffy, you're talking about old systems being to blame here.

44:15The ground stop is lifted, but this is not going to get fixed overnight. Thousands of flights have been delayed. Thousands of flights have been canceled. How can you assure the American people that it is going to be safe to fly? And how long is it going to take for flights to be fully operational and back to normal? So let's talk about cybersecurity. Once again, we're still looking at it. we're not ruling out anything. What it appears to be right now is as Secretary Duffy and FAA was going in and putting patches into the system, they were putting new equipment and new technology and that new equipment, new technology just wasn't, it was overwhelming the older system, which is why Secretary Duffy made it very clear the patchwork doesn't work.

45:02We need one complete system. We need someone to come in and build the whole system. Doing it nickel and diamond together does not work. This is what happens when that takes place. That's why the president has made it very clear. We can't do this. It has to be a complete overhaul of the system, which we estimate to be about$50 billion. However, out of abundance of caution, we are still going to do everything we can to rule it out. If that changes, we will let you know. But it doesn't appear right now that that was that this was anything to do but with technology. So to answer your question, this is not going to get done overnight.

45:39You're right. But when do you want to start it, America? When do you want to start building a brand new system? Well, you have you have a team with President Trump that actually is building it right now, but we don't have full funding. And so I think there's no better time than the present to actually give us the money and let us finish the build. What went down was old, right? It was the old legacy equipment. It failed. And listen, it's going to continue to fail. But my number one job is America's safety. That is my first charge. And so if you look at what happened today, we had a failure. And what happened?

46:20We effectively and safely got aircraft out of the airspace, right? And sometimes people will complain. Why did you shut the airspace down? We just had an incident a couple months ago in New York where that system went down. There's a telecom issue. We will shut the system down. I want you to fly safely. If you miss a baseball game, you miss a wedding, I care about you getting there without any harm. And so, again, this is a time you have a builder president. We can play politics. By the way, play politics all you want on all kinds of issues. That's great, and there's a lot of issues to play politics on.

46:58This is not one of those issues. This is an American issue, an American build, with an American president that knows how to do it. Is this your secretary? Sir, thank you. Will this cascade into Thanksgiving travel plans for college students coming home? Do you expect to see delays, cancellations, even though our days are up? That's a great question. So I believe that it's going to take us some time to get back to capacity and then get people who were disrupted over the course of the last eight hours to get them back to their destination. So we're going to have some makeup to do. I would imagine a lot of my kids are flying next Friday back from college.

47:35I imagine that's when a lot of kids are flying and everyone starts their Thanksgiving travel, which, by the way, is a very busy time for travelers. I think we're going to be back up and operational as we come into the heat of travel during Thanksgiving. And one more, you said earlier you mentioned medical flights, organ transplants are still being flown across the country. Yes, we don't stop those. Because it wasn't a complete outage, it was just we were getting varying degrees of our inputs from radar and from telecom. We were able to still fly those flights safely. And we understand people's lives are basically in the hands of these flights being able to get from point A to point B.

48:18So we were allowing those to go as well as law enforcement. And some of the tanker riverboat crash today down in New Orleans. I mean, Terry, I'm sure you saw the video. Do you have any idea how that happened? And that tanker runs right to the side of it. What are you learning? That's the Coast Guard. Yeah, this looks like it was an engineer, major engineering defect that took place during either they hit the bridge or something caused the ripple effect. I do want to announce, though, by the grace of God, we have not lost one soul. There was 195 souls on board. All 195 souls are accounted for. 32 are at the hospital.

49:02We're still in various conditions, but my last report was there was no critical conditions that were taking place. So just an absolute miracle there. But once again, not connected at all. That was something that took place.

49:23In the run-up, Mr. Secretary, you are having a war against Iran. Was there any input at all beyond this incident that there were Iranian elements or any other elements who may be plotting cyber attacks? No, we're not seeing that. We're not seeing that at all. Yes? Thank you so much for your coordination about this emergency. Speaking of college, a huge industry that relies on travel to begin is college football. Have you guys been in communication with these universities, and do you plan to implement this work coordination there? So, as I mentioned, we're going to allow for general aviation, those larger movements to take place as a priority.

49:59Smaller movements will take a lower priority, and so if you talk about football teams moving, many of those are on charters, and there's a lot of individuals on those charter planes, so I would encourage those football teams to reach out to the FAA to schedule their flight times and make sure they can move to make sure we have games going off tomorrow. Mr. Secretary? Thank you. Thank you. Cameron Arkin from Town Hall. Has there been any communication with the major commercial airlines? And can you just clarify what rights do passengers have right now? I know you mentioned FEMA, but what other rights do they have?

50:35Yeah, so we are in communication with all of our airline partners. We're making them aware as soon as we can with what the issues are, right, because they're also concerned was this cyber what what took place where we had a ground stop and when mark wayne and our and our airlines are navigating the passengers who are stranded in airports but we work fully with them as we come back online and what what planes we can move as quickly as possible to get people to their final destinations and this is one of those scenarios where this is not the fault of the airline. I'm happy to blame the airlines.

51:14I'm happy to blame the weather, but I'm also happy to take the blame when it's with the FAA and air traffic control. And this is a legacy system problem that took place tonight, and we have to handle it accordingly. Thank you, sir. Just describe how this manifested in the air today. Were airplanes still able to communicate with air traffic controllers how did it specifically impact that and separately do you have any sort of an estimate at this point of the economic impact of this stoppage so uh we had intermittent communication and intermittent uh radar and which is why we then shut the airspace down so it wasn't a complete uh blackout in communication or radar so we were able to keep some of those communications going.

52:03But when you have issues and you can't immediately communicate and immediately see where aircraft are at, that's a risk that we're unwilling to tolerate. In regard to economic consequences of what happened today, I think it underscores how important aviation is to our economy. We haven't done a calculation. I was on an airplane from Dallas when this happened, hence my attire, and haven't gone to change. So I apologize for wearing jacket and jeans with you, there'll be time to do an economic analysis. But this is critical for the American economy, which is why the Congress, I'm going to say it a million times, the Congress has to give the resources to the president so we can finish this bill.

52:43But just to be clear to follow up, that means there were times when airplanes and air traffic controllers were not communicating with each other at all. So that can happen, yes. And what happened, we have, we have, Well, we have emergency procedures in place. If this happens, pilots know what to do and air traffic controllers know what to do. And whether it's systems on airplanes that are still operational, it's still communication, though not consistent, we're able to navigate the airspace. And as you saw today, we systematically but slowly brought down 3 ,500-plus aircraft safely across the national airspace, which I want to give credit to the pilots and to our air traffic controllers who are very well trained and know how to navigate this situation.

53:30Are you saying that it was the FAA patching a system that caused this outage? Is that something that's happening constantly? So, yeah, I want to clarify that. This is our old TDM analog system that got overloaded with data and started to experience these issues. And it was in our TRACONs and our centers throughout the NAS. Now, we do have some in our TRACONs and centers that have been upgraded to digital, to IP. Those did not experience these issues, which underscores the point. it's important that we're able to finish this work with additional resources. But how can Americans be confident that this vulnerability won't be an issue again in the coming weeks if what today took place happened?

54:21This is a great question. So listen, I can't build things if I don't have money. This is a great question that you ask. How can America be confident? Well, we do everything. We have the busiest airspace in the world bar none. We have the safest airspace in the world bar none. No one competes with us on safety or complication of the airspace. But if you ask the question, what should we do? Well, we should talk to our senators and our members of Congress to say, we don't deserve this, America. This is the greatest country, by the way, with the greatest president. Let's give the money to fix this very real problem.

54:57And this is not the first time. We had this happen in New York when global leaders were flying in for the UN. We had a similar issue. We had an issue in Newark. It happened twice. How many times does this have to happen before Congress gives the money to fix it? But the Trump administration has been in office for almost two years now, sir. So why hasn't this been a bigger priority for the president? Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress and still do. What network? And with NBC News, sir. NBC. So maybe you haven't covered the 100-plus press conferences that I've done on this issue that have been led by the president.

55:36But I know Fox has. Peter's secured the story. I know many of you have covered the story about the president's ask and my ask to get the money. Right? And so I identify, well, because the Congress has to give it to us, right? And you need a, well, oftentimes, it's a great point. Oftentimes, you need a bipartisan vote, right? So I did get partial funding through one big, beautiful bill. I got$12.5 billion. And with that money, we are spending it and spending it well. But the Congress at the time knew that that was not going to be enough. By the way, this is bipartisan, but on that bill, I didn't have Democrats that voted for it.

56:18We now have an opportunity in an emergency funding bill before the end of the year to give the money. And I think the question should be from NBC to every member. Do you support actually modernizing, making a state-of-the-art air traffic control system? And it's going to take us some time. I can't snap my fingers and build a network overnight. But do you want us to build this for America? And I think every member of Congress should say yes, but every American, I guarantee you, would tell those members, yes, give President Trump, give Duffy the money. Let them finish this job so we don't have to do a press conference at 830 at night ever again.

56:56Sir, while you're building the new system, is it safe to fly? How do we know this isn't going to happen again tomorrow when you bring in new patches? So this is the safest system in the world. And by the way, it hasn't been done in the past because it is complicated. I don't want to lie to anybody. What we're doing is hard. And it hasn't happened in the past because it is hard. But I'll tell you, by doing nothing, you inject way more risk into the system. To use 1980s technology, 1990s software, to use 1970s radar that we don't make parts for anymore, to have an old network, an old network configuration from the 80s versus re-networking the air traffic control system through the FAA.

57:43I believe that should be a priority. And our number one mission when we do any of this is safety. But if you do nothing, the system doesn't get more safe. It gets less safe. And so I would say, America, Congress, let's make this system more safe. Let's continue to lead. We led the world in aviation. We led it in the jet age. We've led in space. Let's continue to lead with a state-of-the-art, a system that no one has, that's the best in the world. But that takes cash. Given your knowledge of the old system and what kind of ins and outs there, why wasn't the agency prepared for some kind of catastrophic failure like we saw today?

58:28Well, I can't anticipate every catastrophic failure that will happen with a TDM network, with an analog network. Shouldn't there have been a backup plan in place in case this network failed? You knew it was an old system you were trying to replace to keep people in the air? So I didn't anticipate that we would have an outage like this. We've had small outages that I've mentioned previously. We didn't think we would have this kind of outage. We did. And what I would tell you is the systems that were deployed kept everybody safe, everyone landed, were able to review what went wrong and then reboot the system and go.

59:06But you will have more of these. You will have more of them unless the American people in the Congress tell us to build. And I can't wait for that. I'm Adi Cornish. I'm Ari Shapiro, and it's Engagement Party. And we get to talk about what we're obsessed with, what we're engaged with, what we need to process with a friend. We are going to be talking about the booming market of toys, games, puzzles, crafts for not children, but adults. Okay, not just adults, kiddults. Kiddulting. This year, for the first time ever, a majority of toy sales were in adult-only households. And there are some other numbers to back this up.

59:46Like in a Harris Poll survey published this year, two-thirds of American adults reported spending$100 or more on playful activities and products like craft kits or action figures. 13 % of adults reported spending$500 or more on these things. So it's a massive market and I think also a massive change in the culture. Follow Engagement Party. wherever you get your podcasts.