Flor-rinse

Wait a minute. We’ve been here before. In 2009, the FAA was already transitioning to fiber-optic infrastructure. A contractor’s router configuration error caused a nationwide network outage affecting 129 FAA facilities and delaying 820 flights. The Department of Transportation’s Inspector General found serious problems with contractor oversight, network monitoring, alarm systems and verification of router changes. And here’s something worth knowing: The contractor was Harris Corporation. Harris later merged with L3 Technologies in 2019 to become L3Harris Technologies. L3Harris is now involved in the FAA’s telecommunications infrastructure. It’s not the same contract or necessarily the same personnel, but there’s a documented corporate connection that deserves scrutiny. Now it’s 2026. We’re being told that another router installation during a fiber transition caused a massive network failure, grounding air traffic across the country. Seventeen years later, and we’re still having these problems? Why wasn’t the infrastructure designed to isolate a failure at one facility? Why weren’t network changes independently tested before implementation? Where are the redundant systems? And what happened to the safeguards identified after the 2009 outage? I’m also wondering why we’re still transitioning copper infrastructure to fiber when the FAA was already doing that in 2009. Yes, some legacy infrastructure remained, but Congress deserves a full accounting of what was completed, what wasn’t, and why. Before asking taxpayers for another $50 billion, perhaps someone should explain why the FAA appears to be repeating failures that were investigated and documented 17 years ago. This isn’t just about one bad router. It’s about decades of modernization, contractor oversight, network design and accountability.