Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has denied that the FAA's new AI-supported SMART system had anything to do with Friday's nationwide ground stop, according to Gizmodo.
Asked at a White House briefing on Friday night whether SMART could have interacted with the systems that failed, Duffy said: "There's no possible way", Gizmodo reports.
He put the failure down to older equipment. Gizmodo reports that he said routers and switches "got overloaded with data" and began giving inconsistent data, so the system was shut down. He said "analog telecom" had crashed and could not be restored straight away, while the newer digital IP switches had not crashed.
Asked about recent upgrades, Duffy said he "didn't anticipate" an outage like this, according to Gizmodo's account.
This is the first official denial of a SMART link. Earlier on Friday, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told CNN that officials were "looking at" whether the new AI-supported system played a part. Until now, only the system's maker, Air Space Intelligence, had denied a connection.
Duffy's account of the cause has not been independently checked, and no investigation findings have been published.