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Mike Johnson: ‘We don’t really need any investigation’ into FAA ground stop (thehill.com)
submitted 8 hours ago by to c/politics@lemmy.world
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House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said there is no need for an investigation into the ground stop issued by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Friday, instead highlighting the need for “investment.”

“We don’t really need any investigation … we need further investment,” Johnson said during an interview with Fox News’s Saturday in America. “I mean, some of this equipment dates back to the eighties so it’s gotta be updated and that’s our responsibility. We’re gonna work to get it done.”

The FAA issued the nationwide ground stop around 4 p.m. EST on Friday. The rare protocol was in place for over four hours. The agency’s last widespread stoppage, which lasted approximately 90 minutes, was in January 2023.

More than 4,500 flights within, into or out of the U.S. were delayed as of Saturday afternoon with over 5,000 canceled, according to flight tracking website FlightAware. Total reported delays on Saturday crossed 15,000.

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[–] 20 points 4 hours ago* (1 child)

Always the stooge trying to cover up for Trump’s blunders. They didn’t need an Untested AI add-on to fix air traffic control. They need to pay workers well enough so it’s a viable career for people to choose so they aren’t so understaffed. The infrastructure is old, but this outage was sloppy AI implementation.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 hours ago

    What they really need to do is hire some government employees strictly to upgrade and maintain the air traffic network

    They claim a contractor, from a company linked to multiple air traffic events, was changing networking equipment from the old stuff to IP networking, and presumably they misconfigured a router and caused a packet storm

    Personally, I do think it was probably some slop AI configuration that is to blame, but even if their incident report is accurate... Why the hell are we letting a little contractor with a bunch of big problems touch our super important special network?

    In any sane world, we'd create a few teams to become experts on the system, and pay them well to take full responsibility for the network forever. It's a very important legacy system, we need specialists on the payroll, not to hire the lowest cost bidder

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