SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
We're joined now by Mary Schiavo. She's an aviation analyst and former inspector general at the Transportation Department. Thanks so much for being with us.
MARY SCHIAVO: Thank you. Good to be with you.
SIMON: Well, thank you. The ground stop lasted more than four hours. What do you make of the explanation from Secretary Duffy and Secretary Mullin?
SCHIAVO: Well, it was a, you know, 30,000-foot explanation. The sad fact is this has happened before. In 2009, this FAA telecommunications infrastructure network crashed again before, probably for the same reasons. And what happened was a contractor - a well-known government contractor that's been criticized in several departments, not just the DOT but also defense, NOAA for weather radar, satellites, etc. - was doing software patches on this telecommunications network that the contractor runs. The patches caused the system to reboot. The rebooting cascaded into a data overload and then the crash. And it was all running on a router manufactured sometime between 2001 and 2006.
And this has happened before. And most coincidentally, or rather as in reading a crystal ball, the Government Accountability Office on September 14, 2026, predicted exactly this. They said, without some major change, the FAA will once again repeat its history of cost overruns and missed deadlines and that they found there are 11,389 different project schedules. And there was no coordination. So people wonder why this happened on a Friday, one of the busiest, you know, travel days. It's because the schedules aren't coordinated. And what did the GAO conclude? That it will result in air traffic outages and disruptions. And there we are. Two months later, it came to pass.
SIMON: You make it sound both very predictable and very dangerous. We were very lucky no one was injured.
SCHIAVO: We are very lucky. And, yes, it was very predictable because, if I also sound a bit frustrated, is - this has been going on literally since the 1990s. In the 1990s, we had to scrap several different systems. Same thing happened. We were trying to rebuild the air traffic control system. We had several different systems and contractors. At one point, there were a million lines of code that no one could fix, and it was scrapped. They started over in 2003.
And from then until literally now, they were building out what was called the NextGen, the next-generation air traffic control system. It cost $36 billion, but we only got about 16% of the deliverables. And it's still a piecemeal, patchwork system. And again, the GAO and other government investigators, my old office, warned that, you know, three-fourths of it is simply not sustainable.
So there was this big push - it has to happen. But it was a very fast push to put all these patches in - again, continue to patch the system - and, of course, so predictable and very dangerous. You know, kudos to the controllers themselves, the human beings and all this, who did get every aircraft - yeah - there were something like 14,000 to 15,000 flights. They got them on the ground safely. Kudos to them.
SIMON: Well, and to underscore what you just said, if this dates back to the 1990s, there have been a number of administrations - Republican, Democratic - that have been - forgive me - negligent.
SCHIAVO: That - well, that's right. And there's one more party in this negligence, and that's Congress, because all these reports I just referenced were requested by Congress - the ones I did, the ones the GAO did. And again, there's a hearing scheduled for this coming Tuesday. They'll be at another hearing. And this - these alarm bells have been going off all over government literally for decades that this system simply doesn't work. We've got '80s, '90s, 2000s technology. And then we hang these brand-new - you know, to put it simply - digital patches on an analog system, and it cannot handle it.
Now, people will say, but wait a minute. You know, Eurocontrol has had some outages. You know, the U.K. has had some outages. Yes, they have, but it's different there. One, they don't have to run a system as big as ours. Two, they don't have as many flights as ours. And three, they have duplication. You know, Eurocontrol can look to the U.K. and others. The U.K. can look to Eurocontrol in Europe. Here we do not have that duplication, which we're supposed to have. We have this one patchwork system. Ideally, we'd have literally two - one to run and one as backup for continuous maintenance. We don't have that.
SIMON: FAA recently started rolling out new, AI-enhanced software in some places. Is that risky?
SCHIAVO: Well, and they have - at least Secretary Duffy has said that that system, called the SMART system, was not at all involved in this. And that system is to help air traffic controllers. And it's not risk at this point, and it should be helpful in the future to avoid bottlenecks. But again, it's an advanced AI system on an old digital platform in some cases - not all. Some of the platforms have been updated.
SIMON: I have to put you on the spot with the final question, Miss Schiavo. Secretary Duffy says the United States has, quote, "the safest airspace in the world," bar none. Do you agree?
SCHIAVO: I agree because yesterday it was the air traffic controllers that delivered. Without them, I know it wouldn't have been, and we'd have had a problem. So thanks again to the human beings yesterday who stepped in.
SIMON: Mary Schiavo is former inspector general at the U.S. Transportation Department. Thank you so much for being with us.
SCHIAVO: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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