Transportation secretary blames ‘routine’ equipment upgrade for grounding flights nationwide

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Saturday that a nationwide ground stop halting flights across the United States was caused by seemingly routine maintenance work. Duffy said that during “routine maintenance,” copper wire at a remote location was being upgraded to fiber optic cable by L3Harris, a longtime contractor for the Federal Aviation Administration. After the upgrade, a router overloaded a critical communication system, leading to the ground stop. “It’s pretty straightforward work that we were doing yesterday at, again, a very remote location,” Duffy said during a Saturday press conference that appeared to have technical issues of its own. “What we’re working to determine was whether we had incompetence — meaning, was it user error or installator error…