“I’ve spoken with 60 air traffic controllers tonight about what Sean Duffy said at the White House today,” said one journalist. “None of them are buying what he said.”
Air traffic controllers are rejecting US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s explanation for Friday’s nationwide flight ground stop, raising questions about the Trump administration’s account of a communications failure that disrupted air travel across the United States, affecting an estimated 1.5 million travelers.
Washington Examiner homeland security reporter Anna Giaritelli told CNN’s Laura Coates during a Friday night interview that she’d spoken with 60 air traffic controllers about the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ground stop, which was just the third to ever occur.
“None of them are buying what he said,” Giaritelli said. “The controllers were saying, ‘We don’t buy that this is actually what’s happening, the reason that Sean Duffy is saying this has happened.’”
So what really happened? It sounds like it’s what we all suspected and it’s the rollout of the AI.
None of them are buying what he said because they said these types of switches that the FAA is doing, they don’t happen during the day, they don’t happen during busy times like a Friday afternoon. They’re doing these midweek, middle of the night when there is no air traffic going on.
It also doesn’t make sense because anything this important is fully redundant. There is no fucking way switching over a switch/router from copper to fiber should include any downtime in a datacenter as important as the FAA communication/radar equipment.
Believe it or not those communications lines they are on are singular, there is not redundancy. Yes, it’s that stupid, they’ve been that stupid about it. Other things may have happened and they may be lying, but there is only one system of communications lines.
I work with the US government. So, on one hand that wouldn’t surprise me. But on the other hand for something this important they often have really strict rules and I would need some actual evidence to trust you. Tech debt in these government agencies is insane and it wouldn’t surprise me too much if they just had an ancient system that doesn’t support redundancy or something like that.
It’s possible these 60 experienced Air Traffic Controllers are competent, though, and can’t relate to the shitty people who make bad decisions who are in charge right now
It’s also possible that there’s a bunch of terminology that’s being slung around inexactly. Non-technical people are hearing “switch,” for example, and are all hearing different things. Even me, a fairly technical person that runs a home network, am not familiar with enterprise-level switch technology and all its intricacies. My assumptions on hearing Duffy’s explainations are different than an expert’s and a laymen’s.
Duffy blamed the disruption on America’s aging air traffic control infrastructure, saying overloaded switches and routers had produced inconsistent radar and communications data.
Ah yeah sure, a fucking switch failing causes a nationwide outage. Totally. Switches dont really get “overloaded” in the first place.
Power grids have switches that are designed to do that though. Can’t wait until AI is introduced into that. WCGW?
This is about network switches tho or wdym?
My reading of that comment is there’s multiple domains where switches are a common component, and introducing a LLM into the mix is guaranteed to lead to cross contamination and perversion of advice for future planning and diagnostics.
Anyone who is impressed by the function or output of a LLM, to the point they believe it is in any way adjacent to intelligence, must be quarantined from decision making processes which affect anyone not similarly cognitively impaired.
So they just want $50BB before the music stops in 2 months, is that it?
Based on everything else this administration has done, I would not be surprised if they had hired some college kids to develop in prod. It would be interesting to find out what actually happened and how.
It happened on a friday. Probably just more stock market manipulation.
Duffy lied
Look at that pic! Sean “Crooked Mouth” Duffy.
