BREAKING: Every Plane In America Grounded, 5,000 Flights Dead, And The Clowns In Charge Have No Idea Why
The third nationwide ground stop in US history, delivered by a reality TV star and his $875 million toy.
|
Three Times In History. This Crew Owns One Of Them.
A full nationwide ground stop has now happened three times. The first was September 11, 2001. The second was a database failure in January 2023 that lasted 90 minutes. The third was today; it ran more than four hours, and it happened on the watch of a Transportation Secretary whose big career break was getting cast on The Real World.
By the time the FAA lifted it tonight:
Close to 5,000 flights were cancelled
JetBlue gave up and scrapped the rest of its domestic schedule for the night
Airports ran out of places to park planes
NBA, NHL and college teams were stranded wherever they were standing
- Federal crash investigators couldn’t get to New Orleans, where a cruise ship and a tanker collided on the Mississippi today, because the federal government had grounded the federal government
“Just A Telecommunications Outage”
Sean Duffy went on X to call it “a communication issue.” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, a man best known for trying to fight a union boss in the middle of a Senate hearing, told reporters outside the White House it was “just a telecommunications outage.” That’s a hell of a word, “just,” when you’re describing the system that stops aluminum tubes full of people from meeting each other at 500 miles an hour.
The White House said Trump was “being updated.” I assume someone drew him a plane.
Nobody on the record will say what caused it. What we’ve got are leaks. CBS sources say an update to the private communications network linking the control centers, run by defence contractor L3Harris, forced a reboot and the whole thing fell over. A CNN airline source says a router failure cascaded across the country. So somebody pushed an update on a Friday afternoon, took down the airspace of a nuclear superpower, and the regime’s official position is a shrug and a shut mouth. But that didn’t stop Duffy and Mullin from blaming you and BIDEN for it all.
Now Let’s Talk About Duffy’s $875 Million Robot
On Tuesday, three days before the sky closed, the FAA expanded a brand new AI system called SMART to all 22 of those same control centers.
SMART is Duffy’s pride and joy. A Boston startup called Air Space Intelligence built it under a 12-year contract worth up to $875.9 million. It was switched on around Washington on September 21. Seven weeks later, they rolled it out to the entire country, because apparently air traffic control is the one place in life where you move fast and break things.
I’ll be straight with you because these people never will. Nobody has proven SMART caused today’s disaster, and the leaks so far point at the comms network. The company is desperate for you to know that. They were on social media denying everything within hours, before a single investigator had finished a single sentence. Mullin has reportedly said investigators will look at whether there’s a link.
And Duffy, who stood at a podium in September and swore “we are not outsourcing aviation to AI,” has not named the system and has not cleared it. When the only question anyone is asking is the only question you refuse to answer, people are going to fill in the blank themselves, and you’ve earned every word of it.
You rolled out an $875 million AI to every control center in America on Tuesday. The sky shut down on Friday. You don’t get to act insulted when people ask.
They Were Warned. In Writing. A Month Ago.
On October 9, more than two dozen members of Congress sent Duffy and FAA boss Bryan Bedford a letter asking them to pause SMART until somebody explained:
How it was tested
What AI models it actually runs on
How it plugs into the existing air traffic systems
Whether controllers were trained on it
The FAA’s answer was to take it nationwide 32 days later.
Follow The Money, Because Of Course There’s Money
In October, Politico got its hands on an internal FAA document showing the agency had drawn up a term sheet to buy an ownership stake in Air Space Intelligence. The regulator wanted a piece of the company it hired and is supposed to be policing. That same month, the company raised $325 million at a $3 billion valuation.
Raw Story is reporting tonight that the same company donated $12,500 this year to the congressional campaign of Michael Alfonso, Sean Duffy’s son-in-law.
I’m sure it’s all above board. These are famously ethical people.
The Humans They Threw Away
While the regime was shopping for software, the people who actually keep planes apart were being treated like an expense line.
About 11,000 certified controllers are on the job
The FAA and the controllers’ union agreed in 2023 that the system needs 14,633
In May, the regime “fixed” the shortage by lowering the target by roughly 2,000 and not inviting the union to the meeting
Controllers are working six-day weeks on forced overtime
A raise Congress funded in the spring still hadn’t hit their paycheques by late August
So the plan was to burn out the humans, buy the robot, grab a slice of the robot company, and call it modernization. You saw the results on every departure board in America today.
Meanwhile, In The Adult Country
Nav Canada’s systems ran normally the whole time. It said it was ready for any diverted aircraft and put traffic measures in place at our four biggest airports. Just before 7 p.m., Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon said Canada had offered the FAA its full assistance, including taking US-bound planes as needed. Ottawa’s airports said they were bracing for diversions.
 |
|
This cost us too. Pearson, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver all froze flights to the States, and hundreds were cancelled in Toronto alone.
We have done this before. On 9/11, when the US closed its skies, Canada took in more than 200 planes at 17 airports, and towns like Gander fed and housed thousands of strangers for days. That was for a friend. Today it was for a government that has spent a year slapping tariffs on us and giggling about a 51st state, and the answer was still yes. Nobody in Ottawa asked for a term sheet first.
What We Still Don’t Know
The real cause, on the record, from anyone with a title
Whether the FAA’s eventual report names SMART or clears it
Why one update could knock out every control center in the country at once
Whether that equity deal with the AI contractor ever closed
How many days it takes to dig out of 5,000 cancellations
What we do know is that the people who promised to make flying great again just delivered the third national ground stop in American history, and the first country to pick up the phone was the one they keep insulting.
Cash Flow Collective 2h You can’t bolt AI onto a broken foundation Friday’s ground stop was not an attack. It was a warning. On Friday, the FAA stopped every departure in the United States. A communication failure hit all 22 Centers that handle traffic above 18,000 feet, with about 3,100 aircraft in the air and bound for US airports. It was not a kinetic attack, and the FBI reportedly does not suspect a cyberattack. It was not a glitch… | ||||
 | ||||
|
No comments:
Post a Comment