A faulty microphone stalled Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s briefing on a flight shutdown he blamed on aging equipment, and CNN’s Wolf Blitzer took a not-so-subtle jab by telling viewers he hoped it wasn’t “antiquated technology.”
CNN cut away to Blitzer on Saturday as feedback screeched through the speakers at Transportation Department headquarters. Duffy and Federal Aviation Administration head Bryan Bedford had come there to explain Friday’s nationwide ground stop.
The FAA halted departures across the country for more than four hours Friday, and about 12,000 flights could not be completed, Bedford said.
“So, yeah, I wanna thank our air traffic controllers, our pilots, who exhibited amazing professionalism yesterday, but also our flight attendants, our ground crews, all of the airport authorities around the country that …” Duffy said before the sound gave out.
“I don’t know — this is not operational,” a technician said.
“They clearly are having some technical issues over there at the Department of Transportation, so there’s been a pause in the statement,” Blitzer told viewers as CNN cut the blaring feedback on Duffy's audio feed.
“Let’s make sure that they fix that microphone. I hope it’s not antiquated technology that they have there from the ’70s or ’80s, that it’s new technology, that microphone, that they can work with,” he added.
“What we have is an incredibly old air-traffic control system,” Duffy told reporters Friday night, as he asked Congress for $50 billion in emergency funding to upgrade it.
Blitzer’s line cast shade on the aging equipment at Duffy’s own transportation department.
“Wolf, it’s awkward and, frankly, embarrassing and really somewhat symbolic of everything that’s happened over the past 24 hours,” CNN correspondent Brian Todd said from the White House. “Just waiting for some answers from Sean Duffy.”
“Check, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven,” Duffy said a few minutes later as technicians worked on the sound system.
“All right. More tech issues as we do the press conference. Sorry about that,” he said once it held.
Duffy has used Blitzer’s word himself to sell his plan to rebuild air traffic control.
“No more replacing floppy disks and other antiquated parts so old you can only find them on eBay,” Duffy posted on X in May 2025, after radar outages at Newark Liberty International Airport.
“I’ve been talking about this for almost two years, and I’ve been asking the Congress for money,” he said Saturday.
Once the sound worked, the briefing showed that Blitzer’s “antiquated” concern reached beyond the microphone. Bedford said maintenance on the FAA’s flight network is logged on paper, so officials had to dig through those records to find out who had been working where when it failed.
The failure itself came during the kind of upgrade Duffy has promised. He said a contractor was switching lines from copper wire to fiber at a remote FAA site Friday when a router flooded the rest of the system.
“What we use today is copper wires. We are one of the last institutions, last businesses, that actually use copper wires,” Duffy said in 2025.
Bedford said Saturday that Friday’s router swap was routine maintenance, not part of the modernization program.
“I do think the worst is behind us,” Bedford said. “But we still do have a significant amount of recovery work to do.”
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