“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.
Duffy is now demanding Congress give him another 50 billion in additional emergency funding without saying what it’s being used for.
That’s a lot of reasons.
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.
I remember I had a friend who worked for the DOJ in like 2010 and told me they didn’t have the technology to print more than one page at a time lol. So yeah I wouldn’t be surprised, especially with something so critical where they’re not going to want to switch over when it could cause issues like this.
Citation needed, my experience tells me otherwise
“these types of switches that the FAA is doing, they don’t happen during the day” This is very confusingly worded. Switches to what? From what? Wasn’t Duffy talking about “switches and routers” as in the network devices? Not “switches” as an action.
Could be the switches from copper lines to fiber line
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.