WASHINGTON / MELBOURNE, Fla. – U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on Saturday pointed the finger at L3Harris Technologies, the Brevard County defense and communications giant, for Friday’s nationwide ground stop that froze air travel across the country for more than four hours.
Speaking at a Saturday morning news conference at Department of Transportation headquarters, Duffy said the outage began while L3Harris was switching telecommunications lines from copper wire to fiber at a remote FAA site, and that a router installed during that work began flooding the rest of the network.
“This is L3Harris,” Duffy said. “It’s our legacy telecom network. It’s owned by L3Harris.” He added that until a new system is built, “I’m stuck with L3Harris, which owns this network.”
“Incompetence” or a Faulty Router?
Duffy stopped short of saying definitively that the company was at fault. He said investigators are still trying to determine whether the problem was human error by L3Harris personnel or defective equipment.
“What we’re working to determine is did we have incompetence, meaning was it user error, from L3 Harris? Or, did they install a faulty router?” Duffy said. He also said the episode amounted to “an FAA system that didn’t meet the moment.”
Duffy described the copper-to-fiber conversion as “pretty straightforward work” made necessary because the old copper line was being discontinued. According to Duffy, the router involved began flooding other routers with more than 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds. He said the FAA will reevaluate whether network work should be performed during daytime hours, noting that work at major facilities is typically done overnight.
Duffy also said there could have been “mistakes made” by L3Harris during a routine procedure and that people will be held “accountable.”.
“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,” L3Harris said in a statement.
“L3Harris has been modernizing the communication infrastructure supporting the National Airspace System in 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.
A Network Run From Brevard County
The system at the center of the outage is the FAA Telecommunications Infrastructure, or FTI, a private network that connects air traffic control centers, towers and radar sites and carries both controller-pilot voice communications and radar data. L3Harris, or its predecessor Harris Corp., has operated FTI since 2002, and it links more than 4,000 FAA facilities.
The program has deep roots on the Space Coast. L3Harris is headquartered at 1025 W. NASA Boulevard in Melbourne, and the company’s FTI Primary Network Operations Control Center is located in Melbourne. In May, the company said it had hired roughly 200 telecommunications engineers at its Melbourne facility for the FAA work and that its FTI modernization was more than 50 percent complete, with completion targeted for 2027.
L3Harris employs about 3,250 engineers and scientists in Florida, according to the company’s Florida fact sheet, and is the only major aerospace and defense company headquartered in the state.
The network has drawn criticism before. A 2023 FAA-commissioned review called FTI obsolete, and in 2009 a misconfigured router during a fiber move disrupted 129 facilities. Last year, after an outage grounded flights at Dallas-area airports, the FAA said L3Harris’ oversight failed to ensure redundancies in the system worked properly. L3Harris said at the time that it acted swiftly and “fully supports the FAA modernization efforts.”
What Happened Friday
The FAA issued the nationwide ground stop at 3:54 p.m. Eastern on Friday, Nov. 13, citing a telecommunications outage affecting multiple Air Route Traffic Control Centers, Al Jazeera reported. The stop lasted more than four hours and was one of the biggest disruptions to U.S. air travel since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, according to NPR.
On Friday night, Duffy said routers on the system became overloaded with data and began producing inconsistent information. “Because of that, we shut the system down,” he said, describing the air traffic control system as “incredibly old,” CBS News reported.
About 12,000 flights could not be completed Friday, including roughly 9,000 commercial and 3,000 private or general aviation flights. More than 9,100 flights were canceled. American Airlines canceled the most at 1,239, followed by Southwest at 1,167, Delta at 1,162 and United at 1,137.
The fallout continued Saturday. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said he expected 4,000 to 5,000 of roughly 41,000 scheduled flights to be canceled, and FlightAware counted more than 4,000 U.S. cancellations by late Saturday morning. The FAA expects schedules to return to normal by the close of business Sunday.
No Sign of Cyberattack
Bedford apologized to travelers and said there was “zero evidence” of AI involvement or nefarious activity, calling the outage an equipment issue. He said the router swap was routine maintenance and not part of the broader modernization effort. Bedford also acknowledged that the FAA’s backup channels all run over a single telecommunications network, and that maintenance records are kept on paper, forcing officials to search paper logs to determine who was working where.
Duffy said officials do not believe a foreign nation attacked the network. “We don’t believe this was cyber at all,” he said.
Duffy also said a newly deployed AI tool called SMART, rolled out by the FAA this week, was not the cause. Air Space Intelligence, the company behind the $875 million system, said the ground stop was not based on or caused by SMART.
Funding Fight and Political Fallout
Duffy used both news conferences to press Congress for more air traffic control funding. President Trump has requested $30 billion, while Duffy said he wants $50 billion on top of the $12.5 billion Congress approved last year. Duffy said the new network architecture would be built with major carriers including AT&T, Verizon and Lumen.
The outage also drew sharp criticism. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul called for Duffy to resign, and U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth called for an investigation. Some air traffic controllers told CNN they “don’t buy” Duffy’s explanation for the ground stop.
Duffy said a review will determine whether the router was installed or configured incorrectly, or whether it was defective.
The Space Coast Rocket has reached out to L3Harris for comment and will update this story with any response.
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