Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says the new routers behind Friday's nationwide ground stop flooded other routers with more than 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds, Reuters reports. Until now the flood had been described only as lasting about 45 minutes.
Reuters reports that this caused the communications problems with aircraft and radar, overloading communications at 17 of the FAA's 22 en route centres. The FAA says communications did not go down, but data at the centres became unstable and no centre went dark. The root cause is still undetermined.
Duffy put the blame on the contractor at his Saturday 14 November briefing. "We need L3Harris or whoever provided that router to us to do a better job", he said, according to Reuters. He also said: "This was an FAA system that didn't meet the moment."
Yahoo News reports him saying that "Until I can build" a new network, "I'm stuck with L3Harris."
L3Harris says it has completed more than 70% of the planned conversion of airspace communications from copper to fibre. CBC reports that the company's website puts this at 4,400 sites as of 2 November. That is consistent with the figure of about 70% given on Saturday by FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford. Reuters reports that the FAA spends $1bn a year maintaining its old copper wire system.