Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin's surprising comments on Friday’s nationwide ground stop have only fueled speculation the White House has been working to tamp down.
At a joint White House press conference, Mullin told reporters the outage appeared to stem from new equipment “overwhelming the system."
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy suddenly snapped to attention, appeared to nudge him, then looked down, shook his head and grimaced.
“What it appears to be right now, as Secretary Duffy and FAA was going in and putting patches into the system,” Mullin said, “they were putting new equipment and new technology and that new equipment and new technology just wasn’t, it was overwhelming the older system.”
The remark fueled questions about whether the FAA’s new artificial intelligence tool played a role. The agency expanded SMART, an $875 million air traffic management system built by Air Space Intelligence, to all 22 of its air route traffic control centers on Nov. 10, three days before the outage, IVN reported.
Air Space Intelligence, the contractor Duffy announced in June would develop the Federal Aviation Administration’s new AI-powered air traffic management system, contributed $12,500 to the congressional campaign of U.S. Rep.-elect Michael Alfonso (R-WI) – Duffy’s son-in-law – in March this year, federal records show.
Duffy has blamed a different culprit – the FAA’s aging telecommunications network, run by contractor L3Harris Technologies.
“I’m stuck with L3Harris, which owns this network,” Duffy said Saturday, saying that a contractor updating a router at a remote site had introduced instability into the system.
Duffy said the router “started flooding other routers in our air traffic control system,” and that officials are investigating “whether we had incompetence” or faulty hardware, according to Yahoo News. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said officials found “zero evidence of anything AI related.”
Air Space Intelligence has denied involvement, saying the ground stop “is not based on or a result of the SMART system.”
Mullin later described the problem as new security patches overwhelming the older system’s routers. That still put the emphasis on new technology rather than on Duffy’s story about a botched contractor job.
Mullin also left the door open to a cyberattack explanation, saying there was “nothing completely certain” and that officials were “still looking.” Duffy brushed off that possibility Saturday: “We don’t believe this was cyber at all.”
Duffy’s own story has shifted, too. On Friday night he said the system “went down,” then corrected himself: “I shouldn’t say it went down – there were inconsistencies.”
Social media users quickly seized on the awkward exchange.
"Duffy literally bumps into him to get him to stop talking," observed radio host Jeremy Hobson.
"You can see the moment of impact of the wheels of the bus hitting as he’s thrown under it," laughed popular X user Hadley Sheley.
"Mullin committed a cardinal sin: he accidentally told the truth," opined Meidas Touch's Brett Meiselas.
"Oops Mullin wasn't supposed to tell the truth (Duffy hangs his head)," agreed legal analyst Jeremy Evan Gold.
"As someone who has built and led the development of several software projects, I have too many questions," wondered journalist Ahmed Baba. "What do you mean 'overwhelming the system?' Was integration testing not properly done with the legacy system before deployment? Can a tech person in the FAA speak on this?"
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