The administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Bryan Bedford, stepped forward this Saturday to reassure American travelers following the largest air shutdown in the country in over two decades, stating that no plane will take off until authorities are absolutely certain that it can do so safely.
"The number one mission of the FAA is to get people to their destination safely. And we will: we will prioritize safety and keep planes on the ground unless we have one hundred percent confidence that we have the stability and resilience to operate safely," Bedford stated.
The official emphasized that the safety net of the air system goes far beyond the agency itself: "The redundancy is not just within the FAA. We have our ground teams, our air teams, the pilots, the controllers; the entire infrastructure is designed with multiple layers of security and redundancy. I am very, very confident that the system is operating today with the same level of safety it had two weeks ago."
Bedford's statements came a day after the FAA ordered, on Friday, November 13, at 3:54 PM Eastern Time, a nationwide halt to all departures in the United States due to a communication failure that affected the 22 regional air traffic control centers in the country.
The suspension lasted for more than four and a half hours, until around 8:15 PM ET, and resulted in over 6,500 cancellations and nearly 10,000 delays, according to reports following the incident.
This Saturday, Bedford estimated that airlines would cancel between 4,000 and 5,000 of the approximately 41,000 flights scheduled for the day, and that schedules would not return to normal until the end of Sunday the 15th.
The Miami International Airport continued to experience cancellations and delays this Saturday, a day after the incident.
Meanwhile, the Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, revealed that the investigation points to the work of the contractor L3Harris Technologies, which was replacing copper connections with fiber optic at a remote FAA facility when the failure occurred.
"What we are trying to determine is whether there was incompetence, that is, if it was a user error or an error by the installer from L3Harris, or if they installed a defective router," Duffy stated to Fox News. "We have not determined what the failure was. Was it the router or were they not doing a good job for us at L3Harris?"
According to Duffy, the router that was being replaced during the transition from copper to fiber began to flood other routers in the air traffic control network, generating over 1,000 connection attempts every four or five seconds and overwhelming equipment that reportedly included Cisco series 600 routers manufactured between 2001 and 2006.
The authorities explicitly ruled out any cyberattack or threat to national security as the cause of the incident.
The episode reignited the debate over the obsolescence of U.S. air infrastructure: approximately 68-70% of the copper network had already been replaced by fiber optics, yet hundreds of facilities continued to operate with technology from decades ago.
Duffy warned that new disruptions could occur if the system is not modernized and urged Congress for an additional 50 billion dollars, even though the chamber had already approved 12.5 billion in July 2025 for that purpose.
This incident is only the third nationwide air shutdown in modern U.S. history, following the September 11, 2001 attacks and the failure of the pilot alert system on January 11, 2023.
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