Former FAA official warns full recovery from ground stop will take at least 48 hours

Former senior FAA air traffic executive Mike McCormick has urged Congress to fund an overhaul of the nation's air traffic control system. He made the call on "Fox & Friends Weekend" on Saturday, after equipment problems led to a nationwide ground stop on Friday.

McCormick helped shut down New York airspace on September 11, 2001. Discussing Friday's outage, he said it is always a challenge to do any modernization, update or technical refresh into the FAA's air traffic control system, comparing it to changing a tire on a car while it is still moving down the road.

Explaining the cause, he said the newer technology overwhelmed the pre-existing technology, leading to an overload of the switching and associated software in the telecommunications system. That led to communication problems, and then eventually the nationwide shutdown, he said.

McCormick said he supports funding initiatives aimed at upgrading the air traffic control system, emphasizing that the technology must meet both current and future demands.

Although flights have resumed, McCormick warned it could take days for air travel to return to normal. He said it will take several days to get all of the aircraft, all the passengers, all the baggage and all of the flight crews where they need to be positioned to get the system up and running from early morning through the evening, and predicted at least 48 hours to restore it completely.

At a Saturday news conference, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said the outage began when a contractor performing routine maintenance at a remote FAA facility attempted to replace outdated copper lines with fiber-optic cables. Duffy said a replacement router installed during the work flooded the agency's telecommunications network, triggering radar and radio instability.

Duffy and Bedford said investigators found no evidence of a cyberattack.

Criticizing contractors, Duffy said many of them take the agency's money and provide really poor service. He said he plans to submit a detailed funding request to Congress covering telecommunications upgrades and improvements to aging runways and control towers, adding that the FAA system, the contractor or the equipment did not meet the moment and caused the outages.

Aviation experts, however, said the decision to halt flights demonstrated the safety measures built into the nation's air traffic system. Josh Schirard, a commercial pilot and head of law enforcement at Byrna Technologies, said the incident showed the system prioritizes passenger safety over convenience, and he praised pilots, air traffic controllers and flight crews for safely bringing aircraft to the ground.

Schirard said the big takeaway from the last 24 hours is how safe the American air system really is, adding that the existing infrastructure, the pilots, the crews, the controllers, the airplanes themselves and the redundancy of protocols and practices combined to allow 3,500 planes and over a million travelers to get on the ground safely in a matter of hours.

Scott Pattillo, a retired United Airlines pilot, said his initial reaction to a nationwide ground stop would have been disbelief if he had been flying at the time, and that it brought back memories of 9/11. As a pilot, he said, the first thing is not to panic.

Pattillo explained that, based on his understanding, the outage disrupted radar data and radio communications for high-altitude air traffic controllers. Airport towers and controllers handling arriving aircraft, however, relied on separate technology that was not affected by the same outage. That distinction, he said, allowed pilots already in the air to continue along their assigned routes and safely reach their destinations.

Pattillo said a pilot has to remain predictable, is trained for certain scenarios, and the best thing to do is continue on that path. He also defended the decision to ground flights nationwide, calling it absolutely the right move, saying that when a level of safety everyone expects starts to be lost, shutting down the airspace was exactly the right call.