Whoops

Yeah, the US just had a complete “ground stop” on Friday, with basically nothing going out (or, presumably, coming in) through the whole nationwide airport system. The miracle of technology, apparently:

The FAA lifted the ground stop at 8.15pm ET Friday. In a White House briefing, Markwayne Mullin, homeland security secretary, and Sean Duffy, the US transportation secretary, appeared to suggest that the cause of Friday’s outage was that older technology became overwhelmed with data after new technology was introduced. The FAA announced three days ago that a new air traffic management tool, known as Smart, was activated at all 22 air route traffic control centers in the US.
“What it appears to be right now is”, Mullin said, “as secretary Duffy and FAA was going in and putting patches into the system, they were putting new equipment and new technology and that new equipment, new technology just wasn’t- it was overwhelming the older system, which is why secretary Duffy made it very clear the patchwork doesn’t work. We need one complete system. We need someone to come in and build the whole system. Doing it nickel- and dime-ing it together does not work. This is what happens when that takes place.”
Duffy denied the new Smart system, which incorporates artificial intelligence, had caused the problem.

Kind of begs the question, why DID you nickel-and-dime it instead of doing it properly the first time? Also, let’s face it, this new system involves AI, so it’s no wonder people are assuming it was to blame, because it probably was. This was hilariously timed (well, as long as you weren’t caught up in the debacle) after the previous day’s meltdown at Microsoft, which also came during some technical upgrade and OBVIOUSLY wasn’t the fault of AI in any way whatsoever, but which, frankly, affected pretty much the entire world…

Duffy and Mullin used Friday night’s briefing as a chance to plead for funding from Congress. “The president for the last year has been asking Congress to fully fund a full build of a brand new air traffic control system,” Duffy said. “I want Congress to give us emergency funding,” Duffy said later. “I want $50bn. President Trump is a builder. He is going to build this network, and deliver for the American people.”
Both men peppered their remarks with lavish praise for Donald Trump, who was curiously quiet during the crisis that lasted for more than four hours.
Last year, ​Congress ​approved $12.5bn to fix ​the FAA’s ageing communications system, and ​on Friday ‌the FAA ​and ​White House asked Congress for another $30.1bn to address other issues.

Andy Borowitz is best known as a satirist, of course, but’s pretty much spot on here. As someone else noted in the ensuing comments, though, apparently this upgrade was supposed to cost less than one billion and Duffy’s already spent twelve times that and wants fifty times more. I don’t see money being well spent here, do you?