Richard Clarke Calls Duffy's 4-Hour Flight Stop Briefing Worst Ever
Updated
Updated · The Daily Beast · Nov 14
Richard Clarke Calls Duffy's 4-Hour Flight Stop Briefing Worst Ever
3 articles · Updated · The Daily Beast · Nov 14
Summary
Richard Clarke said Sean Duffy’s White House briefing on the four-hour nationwide flight ground stop was “perhaps the worst crisis communications press conference” he had ever seen.
Tens of thousands of passengers were stranded after all domestic U.S. flights were halted, and Clarke said Duffy and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin gave contradictory answers that failed to explain the disruption.
Duffy blamed the FAA outage on overloaded, aging telecommunications equipment and later said contractor L3Harris had been doing maintenance, with officials examining user error, installer error or a faulty router.
Clarke challenged Duffy’s quick dismissal of a cyberattack, saying no one should rule that out before a forensic or root-cause analysis is completed.
The criticism deepened pressure on Duffy, who had already tied the breakdown to 1980s-era systems and urged $50 billion for air traffic control modernization.