00:00I want to talk about what actually happened yesterday. Now, those of you who are aviation
00:06reporters have heard me talk about a decades-old air traffic control system, and it's not just
00:12old equipment. We have an incredibly old telecommunication system, and so here's what
00:18we believe happened yesterday. In at least one of our remote FAA locations, a contractor was
00:25doing routine maintenance to switch telecommunication lines from old copper wire, and they were bringing
00:31it over to fiber. That contractor that does the work for us is L3Harris. They're our legacy
00:38provider. They've been working for the FAA for over 20 years, and the network that we
00:44use at the FAA to control the airspace, L3Harris actually owns that network. Now, the work happening
00:52was due to the age of the copper wire that we were replacing. It was such an old wire
00:59that it was being discontinued, meaning that line was going to get shut down. So we had
01:07to switch it over from old copper. We had to bring it over to fiber, going from TDM to IP
01:12or from analog to digital. Now, I want to be clear. This work has been happening in America
01:19for decades. Virtually every single institution in America has gone from copper to fiber, from
01:26analog to digital. Maybe the FAA is the last one to be doing this work because the investments
01:32haven't been made. But this is not complicated. It's pretty straightforward work that we were
01:38doing yesterday at, again, a very remote location. So what we're working to determine was whether
01:45we had incompetence, meaning was it user error or installator error from L3Harris, or did they
01:54install a faulty router? We haven't determined what the fault was. Was it the router or were
02:00they not doing great work for us at L3Harris? Either through contractor error or a faulty piece
02:07of equipment, that router that was being replaced as we switched from copper to fiber, it started flooding
02:15other routers in our air traffic control system. So specifically, we had over 1,000 connection
02:23attempts every four to five seconds. And what that did was gave us issues with our communication with
02:33airplanes, and it also caused some disruption with our radar feeds. And when we see that,
02:40our safety is paramount. We shut down the airspace. And we do it safely, we get you on the ground,
02:47and then we work on isolating the problem, and then opening the airspace back up, which is what we did
02:56yesterday.
02:56you
