Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Sunday on MSNBC’s “Meet the Press” that an overhaul to update air travel control equipment was needed.
NBC host Kristen Welker said, “You talked about the fact that this might not be confined to Newark. Are there other airports that you are concerned about?”
Duffy said, “I’m concerned about the whole airspace. The equipment that we use, much of it we can’t buy parts for new. We have to go on eBay and buy parts if one part goes down. You’re dealing with really old equipment. We are dealing with copper wire, not high-speed fiber. This is a concern. Is it safe? Yes. We have redundancies in place to keep you safe when you fly, but we should also recognize that we’re seeing stress on an old network, and it’s time to fix it.”
Welker said, “Bottom line, is it safe to fly in the United States right now?”
Duffy said, “Listen, we are the safest airspace for sure, and traveling by air is way safer than any other mode of transportation, which is why I take it, my family takes it. But again, that doesn’t mean you look over the horizon and say, hey, if there is a major outage, could that be a risk to life? Of course, it could be, which is why we fix it. Someone should have seen that there were 80 near-misses at the DCA airspace, right? Someone should have seen it and stopped that cross traffic. I have to look and see what is the other risk that exists in the airspace and I should see it and fix it before you lose life. I want to fix it so we preserve life and underscore safety.”
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