00:00This is not going to get done overnight. You're right. But when do you want to start it?
00:04America, when do you want to start building a brand new system? Well, you have a team with
00:10President Trump that actually is building it right now, but we don't have full funding.
00:15And so I think there's no better time than the present to actually give us the money and let
00:20us finish the build. What went down was old, right? It was the old legacy equipment. It failed.
00:27And listen, it's going to continue to fail. But my number one job is America's safety.
00:33That is my first charge. And so if you look at what happened today, we had a failure.
00:41Thank you, Mark Wayne. And good night to everybody. First, I want to thank you for
00:45your partnership and assistance. Mark Wayne has been great. Stephen Miller put together all of
00:53the intelligence assets of the White House. We were in multiple times talking to the president
00:58about what was happening in the airspace. Complete engagement by President Trump's team.
01:04So just I want to walk through what happened today. So at 3.36 p.m., we experienced instability
01:11for our radar and our communications and our centers and our TRACONs across the country. So
01:17if you don't know this, at airports, we have towers. The next rung out is a TRACON. After
01:23that, we have en route centers. The TRACONs and the centers, we started to have inconsistency
01:28in the data from the radars and our communication with airplanes. And we have procedures for this.
01:35Our pilots are well-trained. Our air traffic controllers are well-trained. And at that point,
01:40we issued a ground stop, we had over 3,500 airplanes in the air. They all engaged. And last time
01:46I looked,
01:47we had less than 400 in the airspace as they were all coming in to safely land. And we navigated
01:53it
01:54with our well-known procedures that we have when these incidents happen. I'm going to talk about where
02:01we're at now. But before I do that, when we shut down the airspace, oftentimes there are critical
02:06movements that have to take place, whether it's medevac, there's cargo operations that are moving
02:10critical medicines that save people's lives. We didn't lose all telecom. We didn't lose all radar,
02:16but that instability, because of abundance of caution and making sure we keep the American flyer
02:21safe, we did the ground stop. But we were going to allow those life-saving movements to still occur,
02:27as well as with law enforcement as well. So what happened, right? I've heard a lot of the rumors like
02:33Mark Wayne has. But what we have is an incredibly old air traffic control system. I think every single
02:40one of your networks have covered the president and myself talking about this for the last two years.
02:47The president for the last year has been asking Congress to fully fund a full build of a brand new
02:54air traffic control system. So we have TDM telecom. So this is analog telecom. Our switches,
03:02our routers, actually got overloaded with data. And they went down. And I shouldn't say they went
03:09down. They started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers. And because of that,
03:16we shut the system down. Now, I have already replaced some of those switches with President Trump.
03:21And our new IP switches did not go down. It's the old hardware that went down. And I think the
03:28question for the American people is, do you want your Congress to fund this? President Trump has
03:34asked for the money. He's asked the Congress on a bipartisan approach to say, give us the resources
03:42to build a state of the art air traffic control system. Let's not do a patchwork, a fix to a
03:49system
03:49that's critical for every single family. It's not red. It's not blue. It's not Democrat. It's not
03:53Republican. It's American. Give us the money to fix it. Now, if you look to the past administrations,
04:00going back 25 years, $15 billion has been given to the FAA to fix this air traffic control system.
04:08And guess what? Barely anything was done. We had a down payment. President Trump asked for it in the
04:15one big, beautiful bill of $12.5 billion. We are building in that $12.5 billion. That portion of the
04:22build will be done by the time President Trump leaves office. We are moving at a speed that has
04:27never been seen before with regard to the FAA. But that's a partial funding. I think America demands
04:35that the Congress give the rest of the resources to finish the build. And I think the Congress at a
04:43point looked to the history of the FAA and said, we don't trust you. Well, with President Trump and what
04:49we've done, I think they do trust because what we've done with that first tranche of money.
04:55And so with a brand new state-of-the-art system, you won't have these outages. So what you experienced
05:01today, but you can think back, many of you covered the story from a year and a half ago, we
05:05had outages
05:05in Newark, multiple outages in Newark. This is a continual problem that we have, and it should be
05:12fixed. And so what we want to do, I've asked, the President's asked for $30 billion. I want $50
05:20billion. And by the way, if you look at how much money Congressmen's, Peter, you've covered Congress,
05:24they waste a lot of money. What's more important than having an air traffic control system that
05:30actually works? And so the President said, you know what, let's finish this job. New hardware,
05:36new software, new telecommunication. Many of our towers are almost 100 years old. Our air traffic
05:44controllers have leaky roofs, air conditioning that doesn't work. They're high in the air,
05:48their elevators don't work, their roofs leak. I want new towers. We should also invest in many of
05:55the airports around the country that, frankly, many of them are embarrassing. Let's get the money,
06:00let's invest so we never have to come at 8.30 at night and have a press conference on why
06:07air
06:07travel was shut down, why we have tens of thousands of people in airports separated from their families
06:15without any knowledge of where they're going to sleep tonight. Now, you probably picked up that
06:21we've identified the problem. We've got our centers and our TRACONs operational right now.
06:26And so at 8.15 tonight, Eastern time, we've opened up the airspace. Now, does that mean every flight is
06:33going to fly right now? It's going to be slow, right? So if you're watching, you're at an airport,
06:39check with your airline. It depends on do we have crews available? Do we have pilots and flight
06:45attendants available to fly your flight? We're going to try to move as many of those as we can tonight
06:49if we have the capacity with crews to move those flights. If not, we're going to start tomorrow
06:55morning with our airline partners moving those aircraft. But it's going to take us some time
07:00to unwind what's happened this afternoon. Finally, with general aviation,
07:07if we have aircraft that's moving six people, that's a lower priority. But this weekend,
07:15we have movements of aircraft that are general aviation that might have 60, 80, 100 people on
07:23those aircraft. We are going to give those aircraft a priority. So hopefully tomorrow, we are going to
07:29start to see a far better movement. But we'll take your questions. This is an emergency. This is an
07:37emergency. I want Congress to give us emergency funding. This is bipartisan. This is American. I want
07:44$50 billion. President Trump is a builder. He's going to build this network and deliver for the
07:50American people. But the president can't deliver for America unless the Congress delivers the money to
07:55make it happen.
