Washington: US President Donald Trump on Sunday broke his silence on the nationwide flight disruptions that snarled airline travel over the weekend, using the incident to push Congress for money to fully upgrade America's air traffic control system.
The Republican president has been conspicuously quiet on the ground stop since it began Friday afternoon, instead issuing statements on social media about completely different topics as frustrated passengers were left stranded at airports and his government scrambled with airlines to restore normal travel.
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Trump's remarks on social media
Trump said in a new post on his social media platform that his administration has begun upgrading that system, but that the task should not be done in “drips and drabs.”
The Republican-controlled Congress approved $12.5 billion for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) as part of the party's sweeping tax cut package last year, but Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has repeatedly characterised that funding as a down payment on a broader overhaul of the aging system.
“If Congress approves the desperately needed money for Air Traffic Control, we can get it built quickly and efficiently,” Trump wrote on social media on Sunday.
In another series of posts, Trump sharply criticised what he described as the Biden administration's oversight of aviation systems, alleging that past spending failed to fix outdated infrastructure and delayed modernisation efforts.
"The Biden Administration was an FAA disaster. Everything they touched turned bad. Big money spent unwisely, making an old and broken system worse than when they began," Trump wrote in an initial post.
Biden signed a massive infrastructure bill into law in the first year of his presidency, which set aside $25 billion for the FAA to improve airports and its traffic control towers, to redevelop airport terminals, to “upgrade the foundation” of the air traffic control system, according to the FAA.
Shifting focus to his administration's current strategy, Trump maintained that federal aviation officials already have a blueprint in place to modernise flight control operations and urged lawmakers on Capitol Hill to act without delay.
"We have the knowledge and plan for the Flight Control Systems; we need Congress to give the money, FAST! Our FAA is doing a great job, and is ready to go," he wrote.
“It will be the BEST SYSTEM anywhere in the World. Much of our current air control system is 50 years old - RIDICULOUS!" the president wrote.
Remarks of Transportation Secretary
Duffy was the administration's public face on the ground stop across the Sunday news shows, pressing Congress for billions of dollars for upgrades to the air traffic control infrastructure.
In a post on the social media platform X, Duffy said contractor L3Harris Technologies Inc. had secured two routers from FAA facilities in Texas and Arkansas and was conducting “deep diagnostics” on the equipment. He has said the problem began when L3Harris was replacing a section of old copper wire with new fibre wire, somehow causing the system to overload.
After the wire was replaced at the site in El Dorado and the router was turned on, a problem then cropped up at a facility in Amarillo, Texas, cascading into the ground stop. "We didn't think that should or would happen, he told ABC's 'This Week'.
UPDATE: We spoke with the CEO of L3Harris, and the contractor secured the two routers from the remote FAA facilities in Texas and Arkansas. L3Harris is now conducting deep diagnostics testing at their headquarters in Florida. @FAANews, Juniper, and Cisco engineers are assisting as well.We have no indication of a foreign cyberattack and we will continue to investigate alongside the FBI and our federal law enforcement partners.We took the extraordinary measure of issuing a nationwide ground stop. I want to be crystal clear for everyone in America, my number one priority is to make sure you get to your destination safely @FoxNewsSunday
— Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) November 15, 2026
As for the travelling public, he told CBS' 'Face the Nation' that “we have some delays in the airspace right now,” but looking to the end of the day and into Monday, “we should be running at full capacity.”
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In a ground stop, airplanes and crews are taken out of position, he said, “so it takes a little bit of time for the airliners to get back … at full capacity and operation but we're well on our way.”
Duffy noted that President Trump convened a whole-of-government call on Friday to determine whether intelligence agencies detected any foreign digital footprints or chatter, while the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) continues to assist in the investigation.
"We have no indication that was at play here. We think it was the installation or the router that was the bad actor," Duffy said, adding that investigators remain open to any new evidence.
Defending the decision to halt flights across the country on Friday, Duffy stressed that passenger safety dictated the immediate shutdown of the airspace once network anomalies appeared.
"We took the extraordinary measure of issuing a ground stop. And I want everyone to be clear in America that my number-one priority is to make sure that you get to your destination safely," he told Fox News.
"And when we have inconsistencies in our network, we're going to shut it down," he said.
(With inputs from AP via PTI & ANI)
