NBC host Kristen Welker pressed Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy about why airport outages continued under President Donald Trump’s administration.
“I have to start with the latest out of Newark Airport, where air traffic controllers had another brief radio and radar outage,” Welker told Duffy on Sunday. “This happened early Friday morning. This is, of course, on top of losing contact with pilots multiple times since August. Mr. Secretary, what can you tell us about this latest incident? And why does this keep happening?”
“I’ll tell you, listen, the system is old, right?” Duffy replied. “This is a system that’s at 25 at best, sometimes 50 years old. The Congress and the country haven’t paid attention to it, right?”
“And so what we’re having is some telecom issues, but we’re also having some glitches in our software,” he continued. “As the information comes in, it’s overloading some of our lines, and the system goes down.”
Welker wondered if it’s “safe to fly in and out of Newark Airport right now.”
“It is,” Duffy insisted. “So I fly out of Newark all the time. My family flies out of Newark.”
