The head of the air traffic controllers' union has told Yahoo News that communications with some planes were disrupted during Friday's outage. Yahoo News names him as Daniels. He spoke by phone on Saturday.
He said controllers checked whether they could hand planes off to one another if their own frequencies went down. He also said he had not reviewed the FAA's safety data.
This is the first on-the-record account from the controllers' union. It supports earlier unofficial reports, from an aviation source speaking to CNN and an internal Alaska Airlines message seen by CNBC, that radio communications failed. His account refers to some planes. It does not on its own contradict the FAA's denial that it lost all telecoms.
Separately, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on Saturday that work at small remote sites is routinely done during the day and that the practice will be reevaluated, Yahoo News reports.