Nationwide Ground Stop: Secretary Duffy Blames Router, Trump Blames Biden
Nationwide Ground Stop Secretary Duffy Blames Router ... Trump Blames Biden
Published
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and President Donald Trump offered up two very different explanations for what caused the nationwide ground stop on Friday ... with one pointing to a faulty router, the other blaming Joe Biden.
In several TV appearances Sunday, Duffy said that a radio facility in El Dorado, Arkansas, had undergone a routine router upgrade as they transitioned from copper wires to fiber optic cable.
After spotting an issue at a radar facility in Amarillo, Texas, that had undergone the upgrade weeks ago, both facilities started pinging air traffic control communications at an abnormally high rate.
That in turn led to snowballing failures across other parts of the communications network before the order was given.
Trump's response? It's Biden's fault, of course.
Breaking his silence on the snafu, Trump took to Truth Social, writing ... "The Biden Administration was an FAA disaster. Everything they touched turned bad. Big money spent unwisely, making an old and broken system worse than when they began."
Trump -- who echoed Duffy's request for Congressional funding -- went on to praise the Federal Aviation Administration for doing a "great job."
Since Friday's ground stop ... more than 16,300 flights have been canceled through Sunday.
Duffy's remarks come after a tense moment Friday ... when he visibly shook his head and seemingly nudged DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin after Mullin blamed Duffy and the FAA's new equipment updates for overwhelming the older system.
