“This is a national security risk.” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, at the White House briefing held after the FAA lifted its nationwide ground stop, blames the four-hour halt on an outdated air traffic control system and says Congress must fund the rebuild President Donald Trump has asked for.
The Federal Aviation Administration ordered every departing flight in the United States held on the ground on Friday afternoon, November 13, 2026, after a communications failure hit the regional control centers that guide planes between airports. The stop lasted more than four hours, until the FAA cancelled it at 8:19 p.m. ET. By 8 p.m., more than 10,000 flights had been delayed and 5,000 canceled in the United States, according to FlightAware figures reported by NPR, and at least 827 flights had been diverted. At the White House briefing that followed, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said overloaded network switches and routers in the aging system began feeding controllers inconsistent data, and called it a legacy network problem.
In the passage shown here, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin picks up Duffy’s funding argument and sharpens it. The failure, he says, is a national security risk: the vulnerabilities of old systems are now exposed, the President has declared the situation a national emergency, and Congress, which has not made the air traffic control system a priority, must act and fund the rebuild. Mullin told reporters in the same briefing that investigators had seen zero evidence of a cyberattack and that the failure appeared to be mechanically driven, though he said officials were still looking and would not rule anything out. The passage is presented in one continuous cut, exactly as delivered, from the White House’s own recording of the briefing.
Sources: The White House (official video) – FAA; Zark News reporting, Nov. 13, 2026
Video: The White House
