Voice For Liberty

“You Will Have More of These”: Inside the Mullin–Duffy Briefing on the Nov. 13 Nationwide FAA Ground Stop

Bob Weeks

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After the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) stopped flights at every U.S. airport for about four and a half hours on Friday, Nov. 13, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin gave a roughly 34-minute White House briefing that was part explanation, part funding pitch and part unfinished business. Duffy said radar and radio data from air traffic facilities turned unstable at 3:36 p.m. Eastern because aging telecom switches and routers “got overloaded with data,” while newer IP-based equipment did not fail, and he demanded $50 billion in emergency money from Congress. Mullin said there was “zero evidence” of a cyberattack or rogue artificial intelligence but would not rule either out, and described new equipment overwhelming the older system, which is not quite the same story Duffy told. Duffy acknowledged that a total loss of contact between pilots and controllers “can happen,” called the U.S. airspace the safest in the world, and warned “you will have more of these” unless Congress pays for a new system. He bristled when an NBC reporter asked why a Republican-run Congress hasn’t already funded it.

A fact-checked, topic-by-topic breakdown of what Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said, and how they answered reporters, after the Federal Aviation Administration halted flights at every U.S. airport on Friday, Nov. 13, 2026. Assistance from Claude AI.

Participants

Name Title / Role Part in the briefing
Markwayne Mullin Secretary of Homeland Security; former U.S. senator from Oklahoma, confirmed 54–45 on March 23, 2026, replacing Kristi Noem Opened the briefing; answered questions on cyber threats, foreign involvement, Iran and the New Orleans crash; closed the session
Sean Duffy Secretary of Transportation, whose department includes the FAA Gave the timeline and explanation; made the funding case; answered most questions
Reporters “Peter” (surname and outlet not given in the transcript), a reporter from NBC (name not given), Cameron Arcand of Town Hall, and others unnamed About 30 questions, including four shouted at the end
Mentioned, not present: President Donald Trump President of the United States Both secretaries said they had spoken with him during the outage
Mentioned, not present: Stephen Miller White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser Duffy credited him with pulling together White House intelligence assets

Verdict key used in this post: ✅ Accurate · ⚠️ Misleading / needs context · ❌ False · ℹ️ Unverifiable (opinion, forecast, or a claim I could not confirm from public sources).

The Day in Order

Time (ET) What happened Source
3:36 p.m. Duffy says radar and communications became unstable at centers and TRACONs across the country Duffy, in briefing; ABC7 (2026)
3:44 p.m. FAA ground stop issued, per The Air Current (its timing differs by eight minutes from Duffy’s) The Air Current (2026)
About 5 p.m. Mullin tells reporters there is no sign of a cyberattack and calls it “just a telecommunications outage” (an earlier briefing, not this transcript) The Air Current (2026)
8:15 p.m. FAA lifts the ground stop CNBC (2026)
About 8:30 p.m. This briefing begins; Duffy refers to holding a press conference “at 8:30 at night” Duffy, in briefing

Context for general readers. A ground stop tells airlines to hold planes at their departure airports. It’s rare to apply one to the whole country. Air traffic control works in layers: towers handle takeoffs and landings, TRACONs (Terminal Radar Approach Control facilities) guide planes in and out of busy metro areas, and en route centers track planes between cities. Duffy said the instability hit TRACONs and centers, which is why the whole system was affected, not one airport.

1. What Happened: The Duffy Timeline

What Duffy said

Duffy said that at 3:36 p.m. “we experienced instability for our radar and our communications and our centers and our TRACONs across the country.” Controllers started getting “inconsistency in the data from the radars and our communication with airplanes,” so the FAA issued a ground stop. He said more than 3,500 planes were in the air at the time and “less than 400” remained by the time he spoke. He credited pilots and controllers: “we systematically but slowly brought down 3,500 plus aircraft safely.”

He said the outage wasn’t total: “We didn’t lose all telecom we didn’t lose all radar,” and the ground stop still allowed medical evacuation, critical cargo (including medicines) and law enforcement flights. He announced that at 8:15 p.m. Eastern the FAA had “opened up the airspace,” but cautioned that it “is going to be slow,” that airlines need crews in place, and that “it’s going to take us some time to unwind what’s happened this afternoon.”

Mullin’s opening

Mullin opened with a pre-emptive denial of a rumor: “there is no connection between this and Microsoft.” He said officials had seen “no cyberattack” so far, called the response a sign of Trump’s leadership, and said FEMA had “activated their centers to make sure that there’s no medication that is being missed.” He said “the public was never at danger” and “there was never any lives at risk, there was no flights at risk.”

Fact check

  • 3:36 p.m. start and 8:15 p.m. reopening: ✅ Accurate. Other outlets report the same times (ABC7 San Francisco, 2026; CNBC, 2026). The Air Current put the formal ground stop at 3:44 p.m. (The Air Current, 2026), so the exact “start” depends on whether you count first instability or the FAA order.
  • Duration: ⚠️ A reporter said “five hours.” The reporting says “more than four hours” (CNBC, 2026; MS NOW, 2026). By the times above it was roughly 4½ hours.
  • “Over 3,500 airplanes… less than 400”: ℹ️ Unverified. I did not find a source for the exact counts. Mullin later said “over 3,000 flights in the air,” so the two officials used different figures.
  • Scale of disruption: ✅ Consistent. CNBC reported more than 10,000 flights disrupted, with delays and cancellations expected into the weekend (CNBC, 2026).
  • “No connection to Microsoft”: ℹ️ Unexplained. Mullin did not say what prompted the comparison. The best-known precedent is the July 2024 global IT outage tied to Microsoft and CrowdStrike, which grounded flights at several airlines (NBC News, 2024).
  • FEMA centers “activated” to prevent missed medications: ℹ️ Unverified. I found no corroboration. In the transcript Mullin also introduced Duffy as there to give “the update on FEMA,” which is almost certainly a slip or a transcription error for FAA.
  • Medical and law enforcement flights allowed during the stop: ℹ️ Unverified, plausible. Duffy repeated this when a reporter asked about organ transplants, saying “we don’t stop those.”

2. Was It a Cyberattack? Mullin Answers the Question Twice

The exchange

The first question, from “Peter,” noted that routers overloaded with data “sounds like something that could be caused by a cyberattack” and asked whether either official could say with 100 percent certainty it was not an attack “or a rogue AI.” Duffy passed the question: “I’m going to give this to Markwayne.”

Mullin answered: “there’s nothing completely certain right now. It doesn’t appear that way.” He described a national emergency response involving DHS, the Department of War (abbreviated “DOW” in the transcript), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the National Security Agency. His reasoning was that cyberattackers usually claim credit: “typically some people is going to raise their hand up and say, hey, we did that.” He said, “There’s no chatter. We haven’t seen any footprints,” and that “it appears that this was mechanically driven; however, we’re still looking, so we’re not going to rule that out.”

Pressed on whether he had any specific evidence, Mullin said: “We have seen zero evidence that this was… a cyberattack or an SI [AI] attack.”

A later reporter asked whether he could rule out foreign interference. Mullin: “We’re still looking at it; we’re not ruling out anything.” Another asked, in light of “a war against Iran,” whether there was any sign Iranian or other elements were plotting. Mullin: “No, we’re not — we’re not seeing that at all.”

Duffy added that he “[didn’t] want to rule out that we didn’t have nefarious activity here,” leaving that to Mullin and the cybersecurity team.

Fact check

  • “Zero evidence” of a cyberattack: ✅ Accurately reported. Other outlets quote Mullin the same way, and note he stopped short of ruling out an attack or rogue AI (MS NOW, 2026; The Air Current, 2026).
  • “Nothing completely certain” / “not ruling out anything”: ✅ Consistent with each other. Mullin never claimed more than “no evidence so far.”
  • “Attackers usually claim credit”: ℹ️ A rule of thumb, not proof. Some attacks are never claimed, so the absence of a claim supports his view but doesn’t settle it.
  • No sign of Iranian involvement: ℹ️ Unverifiable from outside. It’s an assessment of ongoing intelligence work.

Context for general readers. The reporter’s “rogue AI” phrase wasn’t random: the FAA had begun using a new AI-based planning tool, called SMART, in September (see Section 8). Duffy later said SMART played no role.

3. What Went Wrong? Two Officials, Two Explanations

What Duffy said

Duffy’s account was that “an incredibly old air traffic control system” failed. He said the FAA still relies on “TDM telecom, so this is analog telecom” and that “our switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data and they went down.” He then corrected himself (“I shouldn’t say they went down; they started to give us inconsistency in the data”) and said that because of that inconsistency, “we shut the system down.”

He said he had already replaced some of those switches with new IP (internet protocol) equipment, and “our new IP switches did not go down; it’s the old hardware that went down.” The fix the FAA deployed “reduce[d] the overloading on our switches,” which he said “gives us a pretty good indication that it was a legacy network problem.” He described “1980s little copper lines” and said, “none of your networks run on 1980 technology.”

What Mullin said

Mullin told reporters that “as Secretary Duffy and FAA was going in and putting patches into the system, they were putting new equipment and new technology, and that new equipment, new technology just wasn’t — it was overwhelming the older system, which is why Secretary Duffy made it very clear the patchwork doesn’t work.” Axios reported that Mullin said officials were looking into incompatibilities between the old equipment and the new technology being installed (Axios, 2026).

The follow-up

A reporter asked Duffy directly: “Are you saying it was the FAA patching a system that caused this outage?” Duffy answered that it was the “old, uh, TDM analog system that got overloaded with data.” Sites already upgraded to IP “did not experience these issues.” An earlier question, “What was different about today specifically?”, got a candid non-answer: “In what kind of vintage you’ll have it happen again, I don’t know, right?… we’re still working on the details of what went wrong today.” NPR noted that Duffy “did not have a ready answer” when pressed on why the systems became overwhelmed on an otherwise normal travel day (NPR, 2026).

Fact check

  • Old equipment failed, new did not: ℹ️ Unverified. No outside source I found confirms which systems failed. Duffy said investigators were still working out the details, and Axios reported that neither official specified the exact initial cause (Axios, 2026).
  • Mullin’s and Duffy’s accounts differ: ⚠️ Needs context. Duffy emphasized failing old gear; Mullin described new gear interacting badly with old gear. Both could be partly true, but the difference matters. If the transition to new equipment contributed, that bears directly on how to spend the next dollar.
  • “A fix that works proves the cause”: ⚠️ Plausible, not proof. Reducing load on the switches fits Duffy’s explanation, but it doesn’t explain why the overload happened on this day, which is the question reporters kept asking.
  • “TDM… is analog telecom”: ⚠️ Imprecise. TDM (time-division multiplexing) is a digital method for sharing a circuit among many signals; it is old, not analog. The point that it is outdated stands.
  • “1980s… copper lines,” “1970s radar,” “1990s software”: ✅ Broadly supported; specific decades unverified. The Government Accountability Office reports that of the FAA’s 138 air traffic control systems, 51 (37 percent) were rated unsustainable and 54 (39 percent) potentially unsustainable (GAO, 2024). A 2026 GAO report says the FAA blamed the 2025 Newark failures on aging copper wiring (GAO, 2026).
  • Some of the old network has already been replaced: ✅ Consistent. A report on the FAA’s modernization said the agency had already replaced nearly half of its copper wires (AeroXplorer, 2026). That makes a mixed old-and-new network plausible, which is also what makes the integration question fair.
  • “Many of our towers are almost 100 years old… roofs leak”: ℹ️ Unverified. Plausible given the age of the system, but I found no source for the specific claim.

Context for general readers. Think of the air traffic network as a highway of data lines between radar sites, towers and control rooms. Most of those lines run through telecom equipment designed decades ago. If a switch on that road starts giving bad or delayed information, controllers can’t be sure where planes are, and the safe response is to stop adding traffic.

4. The Money: $12.5 Billion Spent, $30 Billion Requested, $50 Billion Demanded

What Duffy said

Duffy turned the explanation into a funding appeal: “I’ve asked, the president has asked for $30 billion. I want $50 billion.” He said “this is an emergency” and asked for “emergency funding” from Congress. His claims included:

  • “If you look to the past administrations going back 25 years, $15 billion has been given to the FAA to fix this air traffic control system. And guess what? Barely anything was done.”
  • Trump asked for a “down payment” of $12.5 billion in the One Big, Beautiful Bill, and “that portion of the build will be done by the time President Trump leaves office.”
  • The new money is needed because “Congress at a point looked to the history of the FAA and said we don’t trust you.”
  • “Let’s not do a patchwork fix to a system that’s critical for every single family; it’s not red, it’s not blue.”
  • “We have an opportunity in an emergency funding bill before the end of the year.”

Mullin echoed him: “This is a national security risk… The president has declared this a national emergency, and now we have to have Congress act and fund it.” The full overhaul, he said, would cost “about $50 billion,” and: “this is what happens when Congress kicks the can down the road.”

The NBC exchange

An NBC reporter asked why, with Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress for nearly two years, it hasn’t been a bigger priority. Duffy asked, “What network?” After hearing “NBC,” he said, “maybe you haven’t covered the, um, 100-plus press conferences that I’ve done on this issue,” and added, “I know Fox has.” He said he got “partial funding” of $12.5 billion, and, “on that bill, I didn’t have Democrats that voted for it.” He then turned the question around: “I think the question should be from NBC to every member, do you support actually modernizing, making a state-of-the-art air traffic control system?” He said he does not expect an overnight fix: “I can’t snap my fingers and build a network overnight.”

Fact check

  • $12.5 billion in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act: ✅ Accurate. Congress approved $12.5 billion in 2025 to start the overhaul (Flying Magazine, 2025; Local10, 2025).
  • “No Democrats voted for it”: ✅ Accurate. The final House vote was 218–214, with two Republicans joining all Democrats in opposition (American Press, 2025), and the Senate passed it 51–50 with Vice President JD Vance breaking a tie (Ballotpedia, n.d.).
  • “The president has asked for $30 billion”: ✅ In substance, but the requester was Duffy. Reporting says Duffy made the official $30 billion request in September, split roughly into $10 billion for towers, $10 billion for telecom and technology, and $10 billion for airports (Airline Geeks, 2026; TravelPulse, 2026). I did not find a separate presidential request.
  • “I want $50 billion”: ℹ️ New, and unclear. It’s not clear whether $50 billion is new money on top of the $12.5 billion already approved or the total price of the overhaul. Mullin called $50 billion the cost of a “complete overhaul.”
  • The price has been rising: ⚠️ Context. DOT first said the full job would cost about $31.5 billion, with $19 billion still needed (Local10, 2025). Duffy then asked for $10 billion in April 2026 (TravelPulse, 2026) and $30 billion in September, which would put the total near $42.5 billion (Airline Geeks, 2026). A $50 billion number is a further jump.
  • “$15 billion over 25 years, barely anything done”: ⚠️ Figure unverified; the direction has support. I could not find the $15 billion total. A 2026 report on the modernization effort says a government watchdog found the earlier NextGen program, with a $36 billion budget over two decades, delivered only 16 percent of its promised benefits (Flying Magazine, 2026). GAO has also said the FAA was “slow to modernize the most critical and at-risk systems” (GAO, 2024).
  • “That portion will be done by the time Trump leaves office”: ℹ️ A promise. It matches the FAA’s stated goal of delivering a new system “by the end of 2028” (FAA, 2025), though GAO’s September 2026 report says the program needs better cost and schedule planning (GAO, 2026).
  • “This is bipartisan”: ⚠️ Needs context. The $12.5 billion passed in a party-line bill, as Duffy himself noted. He also said “oftentimes you need a bipartisan vote.” The path he described, an emergency spending bill before year’s end, is consistent with what Sen. Jerry Moran said in July about a later spending bill (Fox 35 Orlando, 2026).
  • Duffy’s reply on “why not a bigger priority”: ⚠️ Partly answers. He has been asking since at least July 2025 (Local10, 2025), which supports his claim that the request isn’t new. It does not explain why a Republican Congress hasn’t acted, which was the question.
  • “I’ve done 100-plus press conferences on this”: ℹ️ Unverifiable. I did not try to count them.
  • “The president has declared this a national emergency”: ℹ️ Unconfirmed. I found no formal declaration tied to Nov. 13. The president did declare a national emergency over airports in March 2026, but that concerned paying TSA workers during a shutdown (Fox News, 2026). It could be that Mullin was describing the situation rather than citing a proclamation. Check the Federal Register before publishing.

5. Is It Safe? “You Will Have More of These”

This section is the heart of the briefing. Reporters asked six or seven versions of the same question: if the system is this fragile, is it safe to fly?

What was asked and said

Did pilots and controllers lose contact? Duffy: “we had intermittent communication and intermittent, uh, radar… it wasn’t a complete blackout.” When a reporter asked, “that means there were times when airplanes and air traffic controllers were not communicating with each other at all?” Duffy said, “So that can happen, yes.” Asked about the safety risk, he said there are “emergency procedures in place” and pilots and controllers “know what to do.” Earlier he had said that when you can’t immediately communicate and see where planes are, “that’s a risk that we’re unwilling to tolerate.”

Will it happen again? The most quoted moment came after a reporter asked why the agency had no backup plan. Duffy: “I didn’t anticipate that we would have an outage like this… But you will have more of these.” Moments later: “You will have more of them unless the American people and the Congress tell us to build.”

Earlier answers on the same point: “it’s going to continue to fail” (about the old equipment); “I can’t anticipate every catastrophic failure that will happen with a TDM network”; and, on whether this exact event would repeat, “I don’t know that this exact scenario will happen.”

Is it safe to fly now? Duffy: “this is the safest system in the world.” He argued that “by doing nothing, you inject way more risk into the system,” and, “if you do nothing, the system doesn’t get more safe, it gets less safe.” He said the U.S. has “the busiest airspace in the world, bar none” and “the safest airspace in the world, bar none.”

Why a ground stop of this length if no one was in danger? Late in the briefing a reporter put Mullin’s opening line to him directly. Mullin: “No one was in danger because of the procedures we put in place. The system went down, we reacted the way that we were trained to react, and everybody came together.”

Fact check

  • Mullin: “never any lives at risk, no flights at risk”: ⚠️ Hard to square with Duffy’s account. No injuries or crashes were reported in the sources I found, and the safety procedures appear to have worked. But Duffy himself described intermittent loss of radar and radio and conceded that total loss of contact “can happen.” That is the exact risk a ground stop exists to manage. “Nobody was hurt” is supported; “nothing was ever at risk” is a stronger claim than Duffy’s own description allows.
  • “That can happen, yes”: ℹ️ Ambiguous. Duffy did not say whether any plane actually lost all contact on Nov. 13, only that it is possible. It was a follow-up question the briefing never closed.
  • “Safest airspace in the world”: ℹ️ Opinion that is hard to verify. There is no single world safety ranking, and the briefing came during a year in which multiple air traffic control telecom failures were in the news.
  • “This isn’t the first time” (New York and Newark): ⚠️ True, but the failures were different. Duffy said “we had this happen in New York when all global leaders were flying in for the UN” and “an issue in Newark. It happened twice.” The Newark failures in April–May 2025 involved aging copper telecom lines at the Philadelphia TRACON (GAO, 2026). The Sept. 21, 2026 New York-area outage began when a primary circuit failed and a backup fiber line was cut accidentally by workers (Reuters, via Honolulu Star-Advertiser, 2026; AP, via WECT, 2026). In that case the cut was in fiber, which is the type of upgrade Duffy is promoting. The common thread is fragile telecom links, not the same failure.
  • “Not the fault of the airline”: ✅ Consistent with federal categories. Air traffic control delays are not treated as “controllable” by the airline under DOT’s delay categories (AeroCorner, 2026).
  • “No backup plan”: ℹ️ Not answered. Duffy said the systems that were deployed “kept everybody safe” and the FAA could “reboot the system and go,” but he did not describe a specific backup for the telecom network itself.

Context for general readers. Duffy’s argument runs two ways at once. He is saying the system is the safest in the world, and also that it will keep failing without money. Those aren’t contradictory (a system can be safe because controllers and pilots follow cautious procedures when equipment fails), but it’s the tension reporters kept pressing on.

6. Getting Back to Normal: Flights, Thanksgiving, Football and Passenger Rights

What was asked and said

  • How long until normal? Duffy: “it’s going to take us some time to get back to capacity.” He said crews and pilots must be in position and, if not enough crews are available, “we’re going to start tomorrow morning with our airline partners.”
  • Thanksgiving: A reporter asked whether delays would cascade into holiday travel for college students. Duffy noted his own kids fly home from college next Friday and said he expects the system to be “back up and operational” as Thanksgiving travel heats up.
  • General aviation: Duffy said larger private and charter movements “might have 60, 80, 100 people” and will get priority, while “aircraft that’s moving six people” is “a lower priority.”
  • College football: Asked about teams traveling this weekend, he encouraged teams “to reach out to the FAA to schedule their flight times and make sure we have games going off tomorrow.”
  • Organ transplants and medical flights: “we don’t stop those.”
  • Airlines and passenger rights (Cameron Arcand, Town Hall): Duffy said the FAA is in communication with “all of our airline partners” and that this “is not the fault of the airline.” He said, “I’m happy to take the blame when it’s with the FAA and air traffic control.” He did not say what passengers are owed.
  • Economic cost: “We haven’t done a calculation,” Duffy said, adding that he was on a plane from Dallas when the ground stop began, “hence my attire.” “There’ll be time to do an economic analysis.”
  • Hotel rooms: Shouted at the end of the briefing. Not answered.

Fact check

  • Recovery will take days: ✅ Consistent. NPR and CNBC both reported that delays and cancellations would stretch into the weekend (NPR, 2026; CNBC, 2026).
  • Back to normal by Thanksgiving (Nov. 26): ℹ️ A forecast. The holiday is almost two weeks away. His own timeline for “next Friday” is Nov. 20.
  • Priority for large charters: ℹ️ An operational claim I could not verify. It is an instruction to teams more than a statement of fact.
  • “No economic calculation yet”: ✅ Candid. Duffy did say it hadn’t been done. For scale, CNBC reported more than 10,000 flights disrupted (CNBC, 2026).
  • “Tens of thousands of people in airports separated from their families”: ✅ Plausible and consistent with reports of hundreds of thousands of travelers affected (CNBC, 2026).
  • Passenger rights: ⚠️ The answer was a non-answer, so here is the context. Federal rules require refunds when an airline cancels or significantly changes a flight and the passenger chooses not to travel. Meals and hotels aren’t required by federal law; they come from each airline’s own customer service plan, which generally applies to disruptions an airline controls (NerdWallet, n.d.; AeroCorner, 2026). Air traffic control delays have never counted as airline-controllable, so those promises may not apply, though many airlines help anyway (AeroCorner, 2026). A weekend of cancellations could leave many people paying for rooms themselves, which is the issue the shouted hotel question was about.

7. Why Wasn’t the Agency Ready? The Hard Questions

What was asked

Three questions in a row went to preparedness:

  1. “Why wasn’t the agency prepared for some kind of catastrophic failure like we saw today?” Duffy: “Well, I can’t anticipate every catastrophic failure that will happen with a TDM network, with an analog network.”
  2. “Shouldn’t there have been a backup plan in place in case this network failed?” Duffy: “I didn’t anticipate that we would have an outage like this. We’ve had small outages… We didn’t think we would have this kind of outage.” He added that “the systems that were deployed kept everybody safe, everyone landed.”
  3. “How can Americans be confident that this vulnerability won’t be an issue again in the coming weeks?” Duffy: “I can’t build things if I don’t have money.” He said Americans should “talk to our Senators and members of Congress.”

Notable moments

  • Duffy said “play politics all you want on all kinds of issues… This is not one of those issues,” then closed several answers by saying Congress is the obstacle: “How many times does this have to happen before Congress gives the money to fix it?”
  • He said Mullin and the cybersecurity team would handle whether anything nefarious happened, and closed one answer by calling America “the greatest country… with the greatest president.” Mullin’s closing remarks about Trump as “a builder and a leader” were similar.

Fact check

  • “I didn’t anticipate an outage like this”: ⚠️ Hard to square with prior warnings. GAO has repeatedly warned about unsustainable air traffic control systems (GAO, 2024), and DOT said in 2025 it needed $19 billion more for the overhaul (Local10, 2025). Duffy’s point may be that this specific failure was a surprise, which is plausible. But he also said on Nov. 13 that the old system “is going to continue to fail,” which implies the risk was known.
  • “We had small outages”: ✅ Accurate. Newark in 2025 and the Northeast in September 2026 were both reported (NPR, 2025; Honolulu Star-Advertiser, 2026).

8. The AI Question: SMART and the “Rogue AI” Theory

What was asked and said

A reporter asked: “Do you know if it had anything to do with the AI program you guys just introduced, the SMART program from the FAA?” Duffy: “this is all the old legacy equipment. All of the new equipment that’s been deployed did not go down.” He explained that SMART “isn’t plugged in to STARS and ERAM… this is completely disconnected” and that “what this does is gives information from the airspace to a human being and gives them a prompt.” The human “will actually decide to accept or deny that prompt.” So, he said, “there was no possible way SMART would have impacted what happened today.” He added, “I love that some people have said this would be the root cause. By the way, if it was, I would tell you that.”

Fact check

  • SMART is real, new and advisory: ✅ Accurate. SMART stands for Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories. The FAA awarded Air Space Intelligence a contract for it in June 2026 (FAA, 2026), and it launched on Sept. 21 in limited mode around Washington, D.C. (FedScoop, 2026). At its debut, Duffy said, “It’s always going to be a human that manages the airspace in America” (CDO Magazine, 2026).
  • “Not plugged into STARS and ERAM”: ℹ️ Unverified independently. STARS and ERAM are the main computer systems that control radar displays at TRACONs and en route centers. The claim fits how SMART has been described publicly (as a planning tool that gives suggestions), but I found no outside confirmation of its technical connections.
  • Both the reporter’s and Mullin’s AI remarks: ✅ Consistent. Mullin said “zero evidence” of a rogue-AI cause, and Duffy said SMART is not wired into the systems that failed.

9. Where Was the President?

What was asked and said

A reporter noted that Trump, who Duffy says made this a priority, had not been heard from. Duffy: “the two of us have talked to him. I’ve talked to him on the phone. I’ve talked to him in the Oval, so has Markwayne.” He said, “I don’t run the president’s comms,” and that Trump “loves aviation, he loves the airspace.” Mullin closed the briefing by saying the president has “allowed Secretary Duffey and us to go out there and explain to you what took place,” adding that this is “what President Trump does, he puts leaders in place, and he allows them to lead.”

Fact check

  • Trump had said nothing publicly: ✅ Accurate as of the briefing. MS NOW reported that Trump had not publicly addressed the ground stop as of shortly before 9 p.m. ET (MS NOW, 2026). I found no later statement.
  • “Spoke to him by phone and in the Oval Office”: ℹ️ Unverifiable.
  • “He’s the greatest president we’ve had” (Mullin, paraphrasing Duffy): ℹ️ Opinion.

10. The Same Night: The New Orleans Riverboat Crash

What was asked and said

A reporter asked about a “tanker riverboat crash today down in New Orleans.” Duffy replied “That’s the Coast Guard,” and Mullin took it. He said it “looks like it was an engineer… major engineering, uh, defect that took place during — either they hit the bridge or something — something caused the ripple effect.” He announced: “by the grace of God, we have not lost one soul. Uh, there was 195 souls on — on board.” He said all were accounted for, “32 are at the hospital,” with “no critical conditions,” and that the crash was “not connected at all” to the FAA outage.

Fact check

  • Everyone accounted for; 32 hospitalized, none critical: ✅ Accurate. New Orleans Mayor Helena Moreno said so Friday evening (Al Jazeera, 2026; NBC News, 2026).
  • Cause, “engineering defect… hit the bridge”: ⚠️ Not supported by what’s been reported. The Coast Guard said the tanker, the Atlantic Asphalt, “lost control” and hit the docked riverboat American Heritage; the reason it lost steering is not known, and a river pilot was at the helm (CNN, 2026). I found no report of a bridge strike. The cause was under investigation.
  • “195 souls on board”: ℹ️ Unconfirmed. Reports I found said 129 passengers plus crew (Al Jazeera, 2026). The 195 total could be right if crew numbered about 66, but I could not confirm it.
  • “Not connected”: ✅ No link reported. The collision happened about 12:30 p.m. local time (Al Jazeera, 2026), hours before the 3:36 p.m. Eastern radar trouble, and I found no report tying the two together.

11. Iran

A reporter said the U.S. is “having a war against Iran” and asked if there was any sign Iranian elements were “plotting” something connected to the outage. Mullin: “No, we’re not — we’re not seeing that at all.” This is covered under Section 2 as well. ℹ️ Unverifiable. It’s a statement about what U.S. intelligence has seen so far.

12. The Questions Nobody Answered

As Mullin closed the briefing, reporters shouted four more questions. None was answered:

  1. “Is the whole ground stop your only option moving forward?”
  2. “Secretary Duffy, are there enough hotel rooms for passengers?”
  3. “Does this have to do with L3Harris?”
  4. “How does this affect the G20?”

Why those questions matter, for general readers:

  • Hotel rooms and stranded travelers are covered in Section 6.
  • L3Harris is a major FAA contractor. The company operates the FAA’s data and voice network infrastructure (L3Harris, 2022), won a July 2026 contract to upgrade and run the national aircraft-tracking network through 2045 (Aviation International News, 2026), and in May described telecom modernization work for the FAA as over 50 percent complete (L3Harris, 2026). That’s presumably why the question was asked. I found no reporting linking L3Harris to the Nov. 13 failure, and the question has not been addressed.
  • The G20 summit of world leaders is scheduled for Dec. 14–15 at Trump National Doral Miami in Florida (City of Doral, n.d.). A repeat outage near that date would affect a major security and travel operation.

Pre-Publication Notes

  • This is a developing story. The cause of the outage has not been officially established. Verdicts reflect reporting available the morning of Nov. 14, 2026. Check for updates from the FAA, DOT and DHS before publishing.
  • Transcript quality. The Factbase/Roll Call transcript contains obvious errors, which I corrected for readability where the meaning was clear: “update on FEMA” (the FAA); “SI attack” (AI attack); “Duffey” and “Mark Wayne” (Duffy and Mullin); “DOW” (Department of War). Quotes are as transcribed, including filler words, and should be spot-checked against the video.
  • Unnamed reporters. Only “Peter,” Cameron Arcand of Town Hall and one NBC reporter are identified in the transcript. Duffy’s reply to the NBC reporter (“I know Fox has”) implies “Peter” may work for Fox, but the transcript doesn’t say so.
  • Timing differences. Duffy gave 3:36 p.m. for the first instability; The Air Current reported the ground stop at 3:44 p.m. I report both.
  • Items I could not verify: the 3,500-plane and 400-plane counts; FEMA’s medication centers; the “$15 billion over 25 years” figure; Duffy’s “100-plus press conferences”; whether SMART is connected to STARS and ERAM; the 195-person count in New Orleans; whether the president formally declared a national emergency over this outage; whether $50 billion is additional or total.
  • Background stated from general knowledge rather than sourced individually: that TDM is a digital, not analog, technology; what STARS and ERAM are; that “DOW” is the Department of War; that Thanksgiving 2026 falls on Nov. 26; and the existence of the ongoing U.S.–Iran conflict the reporter referenced (drawn from this blog’s earlier coverage).
  • Related posts. For earlier coverage of Trump-administration claims and Iran, see the Oct. 19–24 press gaggles fact check on this site.

Works Cited — Transcript (MLA)

“Press Briefing: Markwayne Mullin & Sean Duffy Brief Discuss the FAA Ground Stop – November 13, 2026.” Factbase, Roll Call/FiscalNote, 13 Nov. 2026, rollcall.com/factbase/. Transcript. Accessed 14 Nov. 2026.

Sources (APA)

  1. Airline Geeks. (2026, September 28). Transportation secretary requests $30 billion more for air traffic control upgrades. https://airlinegeeks.com/2026/09/28/transportation-secretary-requests-30-billion-more-for-air-traffic-control-upgrades/
  2. Al Jazeera. (2026, November 13). 32 passengers taken to hospital after tanker hits river cruise boat in US. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/11/13/rescue-efforts-under-way-after-tanker-strikes-river-cruise-boat-in-us
  3. American Press. (2025, July 3). House gives final approval to Trump’s big tax bill, sends it to him to sign [Associated Press]. https://americanpress.com/?p=304907
  4. AeroCorner. (2026, September 5). A new federal rule narrows when airlines owe you a meal or a hotel. https://aerocorner.com/news/dot-airline-delay-cancellation-amenities-rule/
  5. AeroXplorer. (2026, April 22). The US is building an AI brain for its skies, and the man in charge says controllers have nothing to fear. https://aeroxplorer.com/articles/the-us-is-building-an-ai-brain-for-its-skies-and-the-man-in-charge-says-controllers-have-nothing-to-fear.php
  6. Aviation International News. (2026, July 7). FAA taps L3Harris to modernize surveillance network. https://backend.ainonline.com/aviation-news/general-aviation/2026-07-07/faa-taps-l3harris-modernize-surveillance-network
  7. Axios. (2026, November 13). FAA ends hours-long nationwide ground stop. https://www.axios.com/2026/11/13/faa-nationwide-ground-stop
  8. Ballotpedia. (n.d.). One Big Beautiful Bill Act. https://ballotpedia.org/One_Big_Beautiful_Bill_Act
  9. CDO Magazine. (2026, September 22). FAA’s AI rollout highlights data consolidation, human-in-the-loop, and security. https://www.cdomagazine.tech/us-federal-news-bureau/faas-ai-rollout-highlights-data-consolidation-human-in-the-loop-and-security
  10. City of Doral. (n.d.). Doral at the center of G20. https://www.cityofdoral.com/Elected-officials/Christi-Fraga/Doral-at-the-Center-of-G20
  11. CNBC. (2026, November 13). FAA lifts ground stop after more than four hours, but flight cancellations will stretch into the weekend. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/11/13/faa-ground-stop.html
  12. CNN. (2026, November 13). Tanker “lost control” and hit cruise ship in New Orleans, spurring massive evacuation, officials say. https://edition.cnn.com/2026/11/13/us/new-orleans-tanker-crash
  13. FAA. (2025, December 4). Brand New Air Traffic Control System (BNATCS) fact sheet. https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/brand-new-air-traffic-control-system-bnatcs-fact-sheet
  14. FAA. (2026, June 22). Modern skies: Trump’s Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy selects Air Space Intelligence to deploy state-of-the-art air traffic control software. https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/modern-skies-trumps-transportation-secretary-sean-p-duffy-selects-air-space-intelligence
  15. FedScoop. (2026, September). FAA unveils AI aviation data tool in Washington airspace. https://fedscoop.com/?p=91575
  16. Flying Magazine. (2025). Duffy: Up to $20 billion more needed to complete ATC overhaul. https://www.flyingmag.com/duffy-up-to-20-billion-more-needed-to-complete-atc-overhaul/
  17. Flying Magazine. (2026, April 21). FAA developing ATC tech to predict the future. https://cessna120140.com/?p=317350
  18. Fox 35 Orlando. (2026, July 16). Airlines, Boeing push Congress for $20B to modernize air traffic control. https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/air-traffic-control-upgrades
  19. Fox News. (2026, March 26). Trump declares national emergency at airports, will sign order instructing DHS to “immediately pay” TSA agents. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-declares-national-emergency-airports-sign-order-instructing-dhs-immediately-pay-tsa-agents
  20. Government Accountability Office. (2024, September). Air traffic control: FAA actions are urgently needed to modernize aging systems (GAO-24-107001). https://gao.gov/assets/880/873515.pdf
  21. Government Accountability Office. (2026, September 14). Air traffic control systems: Ambitious new modernization effort needs to improve cost and schedule planning (GAO-26-107992). https://files.gao.gov/reports/GAO-26-107992/index.html
  22. Honolulu Star-Advertiser. (2026, September 21). FAA halts East Coast flights after backup fiber cable cut [Reuters]. https://www.staradvertiser.com/2026/09/21/breaking-news/faa-halts-east-coast-flights-after-backup-fiber-cable-cut/
  23. L3Harris. (2022, November). L3Harris celebrates three anniversary milestones with FAA. https://l3harris.com/newsroom/editorial/2022/11/l3harris-celebrates-three-anniversary-milestones-faa
  24. L3Harris. (2026, May 11). L3Harris reaches over 50% in FAA telecommunications modernization. https://l3harris.com/newsroom/press-release/2026/07/faa-awards-l3harris-airspace-surveillance-modernization-contract
  25. Local10. (2025, July 21). Trump administration urges lawmakers to invest $19B in air traffic safety. https://www.local10.com/news/national/2025/07/21/trump-administration-urges-lawmakers-to-invest-19b-in-air-traffic-safety
  26. MS NOW. (2026, November 13). FAA lifts nationwide ground stop after more than four hours. https://www.ms.now/news/faa-ground-stop-all-flights-nationwide
  27. NBC Chicago. (2026, March 23). Senate confirms Markwayne Mullin to be DHS secretary, replacing Kristi Noem. https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/national-international/markwayne-mullin-dhs-secretary-confirmed-by-senate
  28. NBC News. (2024, July 19). Airports fill with long lines and broken blue screens following cancellations and delays due to global IT outage. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna162673
  29. NBC News. (2026, November 13). Everyone accounted for after tanker collides with a New Orleans riverboat. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/rescue-underway-oil-tanker-collides-new-orleans-river-boat-rcna609235
  30. NerdWallet. (n.d.). Flight delay and cancellation compensation: What to know. https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/travel/dot-airline-crackdown
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  32. NPR. (2026, November 13). FAA lifts the nationwide ground stop for all U.S. airports. https://www.npr.org/2026/11/13/nx-s1-6040403/faa-nationwide-groundstop-airports
  33. The Air Current. (2026, November 13). U.S. ends halt on flight departures after nationwide air traffic communications outage. https://theaircurrent.com/feed/dispatches/u-s-halts-flight-departures-nationwide-on-air-traffic-communications-outage/
  34. TravelPulse. (2026, April 22). Trump administration wants $10 billion more for air traffic control upgrades. https://www.travelpulse.com/news/airlines-airports/trump-administration-wants-10-billion-more-for-air-traffic-control-upgrades
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  36. ABC7 San Francisco. (2026, November 13). FAA ground stop live updates: Duffy blames “overloaded” routers; thousands of flights canceled. https://abc7news.com/live-updates/faa-ground-stop-live-updates-what-know-nationwide-flights-are-grounded/20038887/entry/20039403/
  37. TravelPulse. (2026). US seeks another $30 billion to modernize air traffic control system. https://www.travelpulse.com/news/airlines-airports/us-seeks-another-30-billion-to-modernize-air-traffic-control-system

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