The Professional Aviation Safety Specialists, AFL-CIO (PASS), the union that represents FAA technicians, has expressed “extreme concern” about the resolution process in reaction to Thursday’s outage of the Federal Telecommunications Infrastructure (FTI). The outage occurred due to a corrupt router card for the FTI server at the Salt Lake Center in Utah and had a rippling effect that caused significant delays across the country.

FTI, which provides all telecommunications used to transfer critical data used by the FAA for air traffic control, is owned by Harris Corp. That means it is not maintained by the FAA, union officials said. When the outage occurred at the Salt Lake Center, Harris Corp. attempted to troubleshoot the problem remotely, but eventually a Harris FTI technician had to be dispatched to the scene in order to fix the problem. In the end, it took four hours for Harris to rectify the situation.

“If the FAA owned and maintained this system, the problem could have been corrected within minutes,” said Tom Brantley, PASS national president.

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