Trump Offers Bizarre Explanation for Nationwide Flight Chaos
The president was silent as the crisis unfolded, but has emerged with an explanation.
Donald Trump offered a curious explanation for the nationwide aviation meltdown that brought air travel to a standstill on Friday.
The president, 80, blamed the nationwide ground stop, which lasted more than four hours, on a “bunch of old broken stuff” in the air traffic control infrastructure.
Trump reportedly gave that vague explanation for the disruption to Fox News reporter Peter Doocy, who spoke with him by phone.
“He says it does not seem like this is a cyberattack or AI or anything like that,” Doocy told Laura Ingraham. “I asked him a couple different ways, and he said it doesn’t seem like that, and that that is the first thing that they always look for.”
ANDREW KELLY/REUTERS
“He said there’s nobody taking credit which would be common if somebody did execute a huge cyber attack like this on critical infrastructure but that he would let us know and the team would let us know if that is something that happened,” he continued.
Trump had remained effectively silent on the unfolding chaos, which began at around 4 p.m. EST Friday, when the FAA grounded all flights nationwide until 11 p.m. Some flights began resuming shortly after 8 p.m.
“He said instead this seems to be a situation where there’s a bunch of old broken stuff in the infrastructure that the FAA relies on to keep planes in the sky. He said there’s a bunch of—some of this is like 55-year-old equipment that needs to keep working, keep running, and that they have worked on it, they’ve talked to Congress about replacing, it just hasn’t gotten replaced yet. So that is the first information that we have from the president.”
This is a developing story that will be updated.
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