More than 6,000 flights were canceled, thousands more were delayed, and travelers across the country were left dealing with airport chaos after a massive air traffic control disruption. So who’s taking responsibility? Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is pointing to a defense contractor his department hired. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has a much more familiar target: Joe Biden.
The massive disruption triggered widespread chaos at airports across the country, with more than 9,000 flight delays reported Friday and cancellations topping 6,000 on Saturday.
After hours of disruption, federal officials finally lifted a nationwide ground stop that had prevented planes from taking off. But the ripple effects continued, leaving passengers stranded, missing connections and scrambling to find alternative flights.
So what went wrong?
Duffy said the outage was connected to work being performed by defense contractor L3Harris, which had been hired to help replace outdated copper wiring in the air traffic control system with newer fiber-optic cable.
According to Duffy, the contractor was replacing a section of the old wiring when something went wrong and caused the system to overload.
Federal officials are now investigating whether the problem was caused by contractor “incompetence” or a faulty router.
That’s an uncomfortable explanation for an administration whose own transportation secretary is pointing to a company hired to help modernize the very system that just suffered a major breakdown.
But while officials investigate the contractor’s role, Trump has already settled on someone else to blame.
After remaining publicly silent for nearly 48 hours as the crisis unfolded, the president finally addressed the massive disruption Sunday morning.
And, in a move that will surprise absolutely no one, he blamed his predecessor.
In a lengthy Truth Social post, Trump declared that the Biden administration had turned the Federal Aviation Administration into a disaster.
“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.
He then shifted to demanding that Congress approve additional funding for his administration’s plans to rebuild the country’s air traffic control infrastructure.
“We have the knowledge and plan for the Flight Control Systems, we need Congress to give the money, FAST!” Trump added, insisting that the FAA was doing a “great job.”
In a second post, Trump complained that much of the current air traffic control system is 50 years old and argued that Congress needs to approve funding to replace it all at once rather than gradually.
“The Biden Administration set it back years!” he declared.
So, while Duffy is pointing to a defense contractor involved in the modernization work, Trump is pointing the finger at Biden and demanding more money from Congress.
There’s another detail worth mentioning: Trump waited nearly two days before publicly addressing the crisis.
On Saturday, while thousands of travelers were dealing with cancellations and delays, the president was busy attacking U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes over her decision to temporarily block work on his planned renovation of Washington’s East Potomac Golf Links.
Trump has been pushing to transform the historic public golf course into a championship-level venue, repeatedly criticizing its condition and referring to the property as “Trash Island.”
It wasn’t until Sunday morning that he turned his attention to the air travel nightmare, and of course, he turned into the familiar political game of pointing fingers.
