TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES

Trump Transportation Goon Suffers Humiliating Airport Crisis

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy was corrected by his own agency after chaos erupted at several major East Coast airports.

Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy’s $12.5 billion modernization effort got an awkward real-world test after an air traffic control outage caused chaos at major East Coast airports on Monday.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) rolled out artificial intelligence tools like the Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories program—or SMART—to replace aging air traffic control infrastructure and better manage airspace congestion.

The former reality star appeared on PBS NewsHour to launch his new toy—an AI-powered air traffic management tool.

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Duffy boasted about the unveiling on X, captioning a promo video full of whooshing and futuristic digital typing sounds, “COMING TOMORROW: America’s skies get SMARTER 👀.”

The tool began a 90-day pilot at D.C.-area airports on Monday, but a major communications outage overshadowed the show-and-tell.

The Philadelphia TRACON facility, which guides arriving and departing traffic in the region, reported “radio frequency failures” and issued urgent ground stops at around 10 a.m. on Monday.

Philadelphia International, Newark Liberty, and Teterboro airports then faced significant delays and ground stops. JFK and LaGuardia were also later affected.

Hundreds of flights across the U.S. were affected as planes couldn’t leave, and inbound flights were ordered to hold at their departure airports. The disruption ultimately contributed to roughly 7,000 delayed or canceled flights nationwide, according to Reuters.

A passenger posted on Facebook that EWR was entirely shut down and he was stuck on a plane for three hours before heading back to the gate, according to The Daily Mail. Others reported empty gates and stacked taxiways. Flights were being diverted to Cleveland and other surrounding airports.

The FAA later said the affected telecommunications systems had been repaired, allowing flights to resume, although major delays and cancellations continued.

President Donald Trump was set to travel to New York City on Monday to meet with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Air Force One usually flies into John F. Kennedy International Airport. But JFK also experienced a ground stop as operations were halted at major airports in the New York City area just as numerous foreign leaders were flying in for the United Nations General Assembly.

The president’s flight from Washington to New York departed as scheduled from Joint Base Andrews.

Duffy formally unveiled the multibillion-dollar overhaul plan for the FAA’s aging National Airspace System in May. Then the DOT and FAA launched a tracking portal for more than 10,000 modernization projects funded by the initial $12.5 billion allocation.

On Monday, the FAA officially implemented SMART at three major Washington, D.C.-region airports—Ronald Reagan Washington National, Washington Dulles International, and Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall.

The White House has yet to respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment.

The way SMART is supposed to work is by combining roughly 200 live information streams like weather, flight paths, and staffing to spot bottlenecks and weather conflicts before generating routing options for human controllers to review and either accept or reject.

But the FAA has stressed that SMART will not replace controllers or take control of aircraft, and that its recommendations remain subject to human review and approval.

“This tool won’t manage the airspace,” Duffy said during the PBS broadcast of the rollout. “It gives us better information, better data to manage the airspace on behalf of the American people.”

Rep. Don Beyer urged the FAA to suspend the AI tool rollout in a statement on Monday, saying he was informed “air traffic controllers had no hand in the design of the SMART system, nor have they been trained in its use.”

The Democrat said airlines were privately “‘panicking’ about the hasty implementation of this system.”

He suggested the FAA wait until operators have vetted the tool more thoroughly and it’s been independently verified through stress testing.

“Dangerously rushing a system that holds Americans’ lives in its hands is not a good use case for artificial intelligence,” Beyer wrote.

SMART is running through a 90-day evaluation phase before wider expansion to more U.S. locations as early as next summer, according to Politico.

There is no indication that SMART caused or contributed to the air traffic control disruption. The outage instead stemmed from a telecommunications failure at the Philadelphia facility. The primary circuit reportedly “blew” Monday morning, Bedford said. When controllers tried to shift to the backup, they discovered that its fiber-optic connection had also been severed.

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Duffy posted on X that construction contractors working near an Amtrak rail line in New Jersey had dug up and cut one of its fiber cables.

Amtrak pushed back on Duffy’s account, saying a New Jersey Transit contractor was responsible, according to Reuters reporter David Shepardson.

The outage was ultimately resolved Monday evening. But on the very day Duffy was showing off the FAA’s futuristic new AI system, a far more mundane problem—failed communications infrastructure—brought some of the nation’s busiest airports to a standstill.

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