NBC’s Kristen Welker Grills Trump Transpo Chief On Airport Failures: ‘Why Does This Keep Happening?’

NBC News anchor Kristen Welker grilled Trump Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy over several potentially disastrous failures at Newark airport, asking him “why does this keep happening?”

Duffy heads a department that has grappled with a series of high-profile air disasters and a crisis at Newark airport that has many questioning the safety of the hub after multiple incidents in which air traffic controllers lost radar and radio contact this week.

Welker cut right to the chase on Sunday morning’s edition of NBC’s Meet the Press by asking about the problems in Newark, and Duffy blamed an aging system amd a “glitch” that he hopes to have fixed “in short order”:

KRISTEN WELKER: I have to start with the latest out of Newark Airport, where air traffic controllers had another brief radio and radar outage. This happened early Friday morning.

This is of course on top of losing contact with pilots multiple times since August.

Mr. Secretary, what can you tell us about this latest incident and why does this keep happening?

SECRETARY SEAN DUFFY: I’ll tell you, listen, the system is old, right? This is a system that’s 25 at best, sometimes 50 years old.

The Congress and the country haven’t paid attention to it, right. They expect it to work. And so now I think the lights are blinking, the sirens are turning, and they’re saying, listen, we have to fix this, because what you see in Newark is going to happen in other places across the country. It has to be fixed.

And so what we’re having is some telecom issues. But we’re also having some glitches in our software. As the information comes in, it’s overloading some of our lines and the system goes down.

So I’ll just tell you specifically in Newark, we believe we’re gonna have it up and running in short order. We’re gonna be able to fix that glitch and we feel a little more comfortable about our primary line that gets the data in on radar and our redundant line is up and working as well.

Watch above via NBC’s Meet the Press.