The culprit behind the nationwide air traffic outage named in the U.S.
The cause of the air traffic disruption, which for four hours barred planes from departing from all of the country's airports, was work to replace copper cables with fiber optics at one of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) facilities.
As 1news.az reports citing The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), this was stated by U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy.
He placed responsibility on the contractor — the company L3Harris, which, according to him, either installed a faulty router or "did a bad job."
"Right now we are trying to find out whether there was incompetence. Frankly, we intend to hold those responsible accountable," Duffy said.
According to the secretary, the work that L3Harris was carrying out on Friday was routine maintenance that should not have led to serious disruptions. However, after the router was replaced, the device began continuously sending connection requests to other nodes of the flight control system — about a thousand of them every 4–5 seconds. This caused failures in radio communication with aircraft and in the transmission of radar data.
L3Harris has been working with the FAA for decades, WSJ notes. The company said it is assisting with the internal investigation.
"L3Harris takes the nationwide ground stop and its consequences for travelers, airlines and air traffic control operations with the utmost seriousness," the organization said.
