Duffy Floats $50 Billion Price Tag For Congress To Prevent Repeat Paralysis Of US Air Travel

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy doubled-down during a Saturday press conference on his request for Congress to give his department $50 billion to upgrade America’s air traffic control systems.

“If we don’t start to switch out our systems, how long are we going to wait? I think this [outage] is a sign for [Congress] to lean in. This is bipartisan,” Duffy told reporters. Duffy held the briefing to address the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) lifting a Friday order to halt all departing flights across the U.S. in response to a critical outage.

Neither the FAA nor multiple members of Congress immediately responded to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment. The U.S. Department of Transportation referred the DCNF to Duffy’s latest briefing.

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Duffy also said the outage occurred after a contractor in one of the FAA’s “remote” locations was making a “routine” switch from copper to fiber wires.

“So, what we’re working to determine was whether we had incompetence — meaning was it user error or install error from [aerospace and defense contractor] L3Harris — or did they install a faulty router? We haven’t determined what the fault was,” Duffy said.

Duffy also claimed Congress gave his department a “partial payment” for upgrading the FAA’s air traffic control system.

“They gave me $12.5 billion. And one of the problems that we had was [Congress wasn’t] quite sure that we would spend the money well and we’d build with the money,” Duffy said. “And that’s the history of the FAA that goes back from Republicans and Democrats. They haven’t spent the money well. So, they want to make sure we’re going to spend and spend it well. And we have.”

In light of that challenge, Duffy announced his department replaced 69% of the copper wires with “high-speed” fiber, deployed “Surface Awareness Initiative” technology at 143 control towers, modernized 469 radio sites, replaced paper flight strips with electric ones at 25 towers, set up 224 IP voice switch systems at towers, added 18 new tower simulator systems, and installed nine SMR4 surface movement radars.