Transportation secretary says he doesn’t apologize for FAA’s nationwide ground stop

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Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy declined to apologize for the nationwide ground stop that stranded hundreds of thousands of travelers across the country

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on Sunday declined to apologize for the nationwide ground stop on Friday that stranded hundreds of thousands of travelers across the country following a router issue that derailed air traffic control communications.

Instead, the secretary blamed his predecessors and previous presidential administrations that he said did not do enough to modernize the nation’s air traffic control system.

“It happened on my watch, but we have to be clear: I am moving at an incredible speed that no one has done at the FAA or in decades, and I’m proud of the work we’re doing, the attention we’re bringing to this issue,” Duffy told NBC News’ “Meet the Press.” “But I can’t apologize for what was passed off to us, and I can’t blame Republicans or Democrats because it’s all of them.”

The secretary also blamed “30 years of a lack of investment,” from the country’s previous leaders.

He added, “Why they didn’t do that I don’t know, but they gave me a system that needs to be fixed, and President [Donald] Trump and I are going to fix it.”

His remarks come less than two days after the Federal Aviation Administration issued a national ground stop that lasted several hours, forcing planes that were in the air to land and leading to thousands of flight cancellations beginning on Friday and continuing through the weekend.

FAA contractor L3 Harris was working on replacing a copper line with a fiber line at a remote site when the work led a router to overwhelm the national FAA telecommunications network, Duffy said Saturday.

Duffy also said Sunday on “Meet the Press” that he expects airports and airlines to resume normal operations by the end of the day or early Monday morning.

“By the end of today, into tomorrow, I think we’ll be back to normal,” he said, adding that Friday’s ground stop led airplanes and flight crews to be “out of position.”

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