Or did they install a faulty router?” Duffy said. “We haven’t determined what the fault was.”Duffy added that L3Harris, which he said had performed decades of work for the FAA, “didn’t meet the moment”.“They own this network. They’re our prime contractor.
I can’t go somewhere else. They own it,” he said. “Or was it a faulty router?
And we’re going to find that out. And frankly, we’re going to hold people accountable.”Al Jazeera has reached out to L3Harris for comment on the allegations but has not yet heard back.Amid concerns that Friday’s ground stop was the result of a cyberattack, the US government said Saturday it did not “believe” that was the cause.“Once we were able to isolate the work being done at this location, all of our systems came back online,” Duffy said. “So, we don’t believe this was cyber at all.”United States Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, left, looks on as FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford speaks during a news briefing in Washington, DC, on Saturday [Aaron Schwartz/AFP]The head of the FAA, who also spoke at Saturday’s news conference, echoed the transportation secretary’s remarks, saying the system outage was caused by an equipment error.“We see zero evidence of anything nefarious, and zero evidence of anything AI-related,” FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said.A root cause analysis would be shared with the public when it is available, he added.As airlines and thousands of travellers begin the process of digging out from Friday’s groundstop, the longest and only second nationwide stop since 9/11 , the FAA said full schedule integrity is expected by the end of Sunday.“We have crews and aircraft that are out of position for 12,000 flights that were lost,” Bedford said. “These crews, pilots and flight attendants need to get to their points of reconnection with their schedules.”Bedford said the FAA expects about 4,000 to 5,000 flights out of the 41,000 scheduled on Saturday to be cancelled.“That will set us up for a full recovery tomorrow,” he said. “I do think the worst is behind us.”