“I’ve spoken with 60 air traffic controllers tonight about what Sean Duffy said at the White House today,” said one journalist. “None of them are buying what he said.”
Air traffic controllers are rejecting US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s explanation for Friday’s nationwide flight ground stop, raising questions about the Trump administration’s account of a communications failure that disrupted air travel across the United States, affecting an estimated 1.5 million travelers.
Washington Examiner homeland security reporter Anna Giaritelli told CNN’s Laura Coates during a Friday night interview that she’d spoken with 60 air traffic controllers about the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ground stop, which was just the third to ever occur.
“None of them are buying what he said,” Giaritelli said. “The controllers were saying, ‘We don’t buy that this is actually what’s happening, the reason that Sean Duffy is saying this has happened.’”
Listening to either of these sources is like listening to competing lawyers talking about their clients. Both sides have motivation to spin the truth. Which means the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. I don’t believe it was AI. Mainly because I doubt the AI project really uses much AI in the first place. They slap AI on everything just because they think it sounds better. I don’t believe air traffic controllers are all that knowledgeable on how the network infrastructure works. So they are a worthless sourcemof opinion on this. I do believe some system couldn’t handle the busy friday network traffic. This kind of thing happens all the time during upgrades. They probably did some work mid week, changed a path for network traffic, but didn’t account for the bandwidth it would need on a friday. They probably took their numbers from the odd hours which is when they were working. With the approaching holiday, things are going to get busier. So expect more problems next weekend.