Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy can’t fully explain the flight shutdown but wants football teams moving

After a disastrous White House press conference on Friday left basic questions about the nationwide flight shutdown that left travelers around the world stranded unanswered, President Donald Trump’s transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, tried again on Saturday.

The former MTV Real World cast member offered a more specific account, but also more blame for a contractor and Congress, more praise for Trump, and another detour into football logistics, without fully explaining how routine maintenance disrupted aviation in the United States.

Federal Aviation Administration chief Bryan Bedford apologized to travelers and distinguished the maintenance involved from the modernization program Duffy repeatedly promoted.

Related: Robert Garcia demands answers as Trump officials offer few details on nationwide ground stop stranding flyers

Routine work with nationwide consequences

The briefing began with a smaller technology failure of its own. Audio feedback and microphone problems disrupted the setup before Duffy began explaining the telecommunications trouble that had brought departures nationwide to a halt.

FAA acting Chief Technology Officer Rebecca Guy offered more detail about the response, saying technicians identified two locations flooding the network with connection attempts and disabled both to stabilize it. Officials also disabled certain functions on roughly 60 deployed routers and were conducting additional testing with L3Harris, a defense and aerospace technology company that owns and operates the FAA’s telecommunications network under a long-running contract.

Asked whether officials knew the problem could have such widespread consequences, Guy admitted they didn’t.

“We did not, and that is exactly why we want to continue to verify and do analysis as we go forward,” she said.

Duffy said L3Harris was replacing copper connections with fiber when a router began generating more than 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds.

The overload, according to him, disrupted communications and radar feeds. Investigators had not determined whether faulty equipment, installation, or configuration caused it, he said.

“What we’re working to determine was whether we had incompetence,” Duffy said, describing possible contractor error.

Asked why the work occurred during Friday afternoon travel, Duffy defended daytime maintenance at smaller locations as routine but said scheduling would be reevaluated.

“If we’re going to be at Newark, if we’re going to be in one of our big facilities, those switchovers happen at night because they can have a bigger impact,” Duffy said. “But these smaller locations don’t have that kind of impact.”

More than 3500 flights were in the sky when the ground stop was issued, and thousands more were canceled, stranding passengers on planes and in airports nationwide.

That explanation followed Friday’s White House briefing, when Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin stumbled through an account suggesting government upgrades were “overwhelming the older system,” while Duffy insisted newly deployed equipment remained operational.

Mullin’s cyberattack assessment moved from “there is actually no cyber attack” to “there’s nothing completely certain right now.” Both secretaries repeatedly praised Trump.

On Saturday, Bedford distinguished between maintaining the existing network and replacing it.

“I think we’re conflating modernization with this upgrade at this particular facility,” he said, explaining that the work was outside the administration’s $12.5 billion modernization program.

He also clarified that facilities had not completely lost service. “Nothing went down,” Bedford said. “What we saw was instability, and we couldn’t explain the instability.”

Problems spread through 17 of 22 en route facilities and manually maintained work records complicated efforts to identify the source, he said.

Related: Disastrous White House press conference raises more questions than answers about nationwide ground stop

Blaming Congress under Republican control

Duffy repeatedly faulted Congress for inadequate funding, although Republicans control both chambers and the White House and have held unified power throughout Trump’s second term.

“I’m stuck with L3Harris, who owns this network,” he said of the contractor, which had not commented publicly.

Duffy defended his $50 billion demand as covering broader needs, including towers and runways, and promised details Monday. But why had existing safeguards not contained the problem?

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg raised that question with reporters in Colorado on Friday, stressing that he had no inside knowledge.

“It is not clear to me why that redundancy did not prevent an outage of this magnitude,” he said.

Buttigieg defended the Biden administration’s modernization work, called for transparency and praised career employees.

“This should not be about politics,” he said. “I am very much rooting for them to get this resolved as quickly as possible.”

Duffy’s obsession with college football teams

Duffy also repeatedly returned to football logistics. On Friday, he encouraged teams to contact the FAA to arrange flights “to make sure we have games going off tomorrow,” explaining that larger charter flights would receive priority over smaller private flights.

On Saturday, football again came up in his explanation of the shutdown’s consequences. “If you like football, I know we’ve had some disruptions to the college football schedule. Some games are being moved,” he said. “That’s not the most important thing, but we do want to move teams around the country so we can have playoffs happen.”

He returned to the subject later while defending the decision to halt departures. “Games may not happen on time. Today? Saturday? Saturday. I lost track of time,” Duffy said, before mentioning travelers missing weddings, birthday parties and trips home. “I want them to get home safely.”

Recovery remained unfinished

Bedford said approximately 12,000 flights were not recovered Friday, including 9,000 commercial flights. He projected another 4,000 to 5,000 cancellations Saturday, with airlines expecting full recovery by Sunday evening.

Officials reported no evidence of a cyberattack or AI involvement and credited pilots and controllers with keeping passengers safe.

Bedford offered travelers a “sincere apology.” Duffy promised accountability.

Oversight is coming

Rep. Robert Garcia, the California Democrat who sits on the House Aviation subcommittee and who will take over as chairman of the House Oversight Committee in January, renewed his demand for answers Saturday. “There must be full public transparency on what happened to our air travel systems and why,” he wrote on social media, calling for adequate funding and upgrades and thanking aviation workers.

As The Advocate reported Friday, Garcia urged federal officials to be transparent as the shutdown unfolded during his appearance on MS NOW with Nicolle Wallace. He cautioned against prejudging the cause and warned that grounding flights nationwide would create cascading disruptions across airline schedules.