The fallout over the recent nationwide ground stop of all American commercial flights is still... well, falling out. While it may be a while before we understand everything that led to this matter, the Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, notes that a federal contractor, L3Harris, was involved in the upgrade of some of the systems that went down.
On Saturday, L3Harris replied.
A Federal Aviation Administration contractor on Saturday responded to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy who suggested that their error could have contributed to the ground stop that occurred on Friday.
"L3Harris has been modernizing the communications infrastructure supporting the National Airspace System in close coordination with the FAA. With safety and reliability as our highest priorities, L3Harris, together with its telco partners and the FAA, has completed more than 70% of the planned airspace communications conversion from legacy copper wires to a fiber optic system," the company said in a statement.
"We are supporting the FAA in its investigation to understand the conditions that led to the Nov. 13 ground stop of our nation’s air travel. L3Harris takes the nationwide ground stop and its impact on travelers, airlines and air traffic operations seriously," the company also said.
Duffy said on Saturday that a contractor error might have played a role in the need for the ground stop.
That response from L3Harris sounds a lot like, "well, maybe."
Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, on Fox News Sunday with host Shannon Bream, had a few comments of his own.
UPDATE: We spoke with the CEO of L3Harris, and the contractor secured the two routers from the remote FAA facilities in Texas and Arkansas. L3Harris is now conducting deep diagnostics testing at their headquarters in Florida. @FAANews, Juniper, and Cisco engineers are assisting as well. We have no indication of a foreign cyberattack and we will continue to investigate alongside the FBI and our federal law enforcement partners. We took the extraordinary measure of issuing a nationwide ground stop. I want to be crystal clear for everyone in America, my number one priority is to make sure you get to your destination safely @FoxNewsSunday
— Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) November 15, 2026
UPDATE: We spoke with the CEO of L3Harris, and the contractor secured the two routers from the remote FAA facilities in Texas and Arkansas. L3Harris is now conducting deep diagnostics testing at their headquarters in Florida. @FAANews, Juniper, and Cisco engineers are assisting as well.
We have no indication of a foreign cyberattack and we will continue to investigate alongside the FBI and our federal law enforcement partners.
We took the extraordinary measure of issuing a nationwide ground stop. I want to be crystal clear for everyone in America, my number one priority is to make sure you get to your destination safely. @FoxNewsSunday
Here's that conversation:
We took the extraordinary measure of issuing a ground stop. And, I want everyone to be clear in America, that our... my number one priority is to make sure you get to your destination safely. And, when we have inconsistencies in our network, we're going to shut it down. I'm going to make sure you get there safely, and that was the measure that was taken on Friday. But as to your question about what's happening in the network, we have the router, it's at the L3Harris lab in Florida with FAA staff. We are doing a full review of the router and the process that was used in El Dorado, Texas. The FBI is offering assistance. President Trump actually had the whole of government on the phone, on Friday. Was anyone seeing footprints? Was anyone hearing chatter? Was this a cyberattack from a foreign nation? We have no indication that that was at play here. We think it was the installation of the router that was the bad actor. But we're open if we see something else. We're going to continue to investigate it with our federal partners and law enforcement. At this point, we don't think that was the cause. It was the router or it was the installation.
That's a relief.
That's not to say that any number of bad actors wouldn't love to carry out some kind of cyberattack on our air traffic control system. It may not look like this was one such, but there are people who would carry one out if they could, and it stands to reason that a comprehensive upgrade of the entire system should take that into account.
For the time being, it looks like all the parties involved in Friday's ground stop are engaged and working out what happened. And, speaking as someone who has spent way, way too many hours in airliners, if I'm climbing inside a sealed aluminum tube with a couple hundred people and shooting up to 35,000 feet to fly a couple of thousand miles, I want everything in that aircraft and in the ground-based control systems to be working at tip-top level. If that means a delay, then that's what it means, that's all.
Stay tuned.
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