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By Hollie Silverman
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Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy acknowledged Sunday that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) may need to reevaluate when it conducts infrastructure upgrades after routine daytime maintenance at a remote facility triggered a nationwide ground stop that disrupted air travel across the country.
Appearing on CBS News’ Face the Nation, Duffy explained that while maintenance at major facilities is generally performed overnight, work at remote locations has historically been allowed during the day because the risk was considered low.
“Obviously, on Friday we saw no,” Duffy told moderator Margaret Brennan. “It flooded our network, and we had to take the extraordinary step of issuing a ground stop.”
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He added: “We're going to have to reevaluate now when we do this work.”
The FAA said the incident resulted in approximately 12,462 flight cancellations, including 9,082 by major airlines, though the agency cautioned that not every cancellation was directly caused by the ground stop.
The Incident in Arkansas
Friday’s disruption occurred as FAA telecommunications contractor L3Harris Technologies was working at a remote facility in El Dorado, Arkansas, replacing an aging copper communications connection with fiber.
Duffy said the copper connection could no longer be used and that the telecommunications provider had required the FAA to make the change.
“We were forced by the telecom provider to actually update that copper to fiber, and we brought in our routers and did the work,” Duffy said. “And that's when we saw the flooding of the network.”
Investigators are examining why a router at the Arkansas site began broadcasting data across the network and why a similar issue emerged in Amarillo, Texas, where similar work had been completed weeks earlier.
The investigation involves the FAA and L3Harris, with assistance offered by the FBI. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said officials have found no evidence of malicious activity. Meanwhile, the FAA has disabled the broadcasting capability on 69 routers across the national airspace system as a precaution.
Asked Sunday whether the agency should have anticipated the risk, Duffy defended its procedures.
“We do risk assessments on everything,” he said, adding that similar work had been conducted thousands of times without incident. “We have to get off old network, old telecom.”
“We're looking at that right now, and when we know what the root cause of this issue was, was it the install from L3Harris? Was it the router? I'm going to tell you and the American people what we find,” the transportation secretary said.
Newsweek reached out to L3Harris by email Sunday for comment.
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Scrutiny Over Modernization Pace
Friday's nationwide ground stop has renewed scrutiny on a September report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which warned that the FAA’s modernization initiative was moving at an “unprecedented speed” and risking air traffic disruptions.
The watchdog found that the agency lacked a comprehensive lifecycle cost estimate and an integrated master schedule for its modernization program. Instead, the FAA was managing 11,389 individual project schedules that were not integrated, meaning installations could be scheduled at the same facilities without optimizing the work to reduce effects on air traffic controller operations.
The GAO warned that the lack of coordination could extend the nation’s reliance on outdated systems or contribute to air traffic disruptions.
Scale of Upgrades and Funding
The work in El Dorado is part of a broader push to modernize the FAA's telecommunications, radar, radio, and weather infrastructure. Duffy noted that approximately 70 percent of the FAA’s copper connections have now been converted to fiber, up from 2,560 of 5,170 connections reported by the GAO in May 2026. Nearly 470 radios have also been switched over, Duffy added.
Congress appropriated $12.5 billion in July 2025 for the first phase of the Brand New Air Traffic Control System (BNATC) modernization program, which runs through December 2028. According to GAO's report, a second phase focusing on advanced automation is expected to require about $10.2 billion, though no timeline has been finalized.
Duffy confirmed Sunday that he is seeking a total of $50 billion for the complete modernization effort. He noted that acquiring new equipment takes time and significant investment.
“I can't go buy radar off the shelf,” Duffy said. “This is a massive order.”
As the agency investigates Friday's failure and reviews its risk assessments, Duffy acknowledged the immense scale of the undertaking.
“For decades, this work in the FAA has not been done,” Duffy said. “It hasn't been done because it's hard.”
Contact Newsweek editors for this story: Steve Mollman and Anthony Murray.
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