L3Harris has been modernizing the communications infrastructure supporting the National Airspace System in close coordination with the FAA. With safety and reliability as our highest priorities, L3Harris, together with its telco partners and the FAA, has completed more than 70% of the planned airspace communications conversion from legacy copper wires to a fiber optic system. We are supporting the FAA in its investigation to understand the conditions that led to the Nov. 13 ground stop of our nation’s air travel. L3Harris takes the nationwide ground stop and its impact on travelers, airlines and air traffic operations seriously.
> “Which begs the question for us: What did L3Harris do? Did they make mistakes yesterday?” Duffy told reporters. “They own this network. They’re our prime contractor. I can’t go somewhere else. They own it. Or was it a faulty router? And we’re going to find that out. And frankly, we’re going to hold people accountable.”
Someone's gotta educate the asshole that the buck stops at him. He is responsible.
You think he’s personally responsible for a network equipment maintenance failure, for a project that was apparently already 70% complete and which likely started long before he took office? He’s the head of a government agency, not a network tech.
What exactly do you expect him to do? Put yourself in his shoes.
He handled it terribly. His top priorities were spreading blame and kissing the president's ass. God help us if there's a more serious problem with anything while these people are in charge.
That seems like a different reason for him to be fired. If he had a competent boss, I could see that happening, but not with Trump as president. Trump is all about reality TV. He probably wishes more of his cabinet and department heads made it.
Why do you want him to stay? You seem to be awfully keen to defend a man who isn't doing his job and allowed a major ATC failure to occur on his watch. You're all over this thread defending a useless man.
I don’t care if he stays or goes. I care that others, particularly in a forum of engineers (who are supposedly more intelligent than most) are demanding his head for the wrong reasons.
It’s stupid to fire engineers for accidentally causing operational incidents, and it’s similarly stupid to fire their bosses unless they intentionally or negligently set the stage to increase the risk of serious incidents. Mistakes are the fertilizer that bears the fruit of wisdom and experience.
Meanwhile, people here think Jensen Huang should be allowed to return to the helm at Nvidia even though doing so would be about the stupidest act the board could take; doing so would put the entire company at even greater risk of criminal liability.
I went through the whole thread and I totally agree with you. Regardless of anything else, unless there are proper processes in place, blaming an individual becomes just theater. The overall goal for any system failure should be to improve the process, unless the failure was intentional or due to negligence.
I think it is silly to not fire people and yet expect people to still learn from the mistake. If the only downside to taking down the nations ATC is some lawyer composed response, why would anyone be more careful about it in the future? Why wouldn't they take it as a sign that they could play it even faster and looser in the future if there is no downside to them?
Ive never made a mistake that costs more than I am worth, so no. I would expect if I made a mistake costing millions of dollars or more I would be fired.
Nearly every officer that Trump has appointed this term is unqualified. That doesn’t make them necessarily culpable for everything that happens in their portfolios, especially for projects underway before they took office.
he did 100% what this administration does daily: blamed someone else, reassure they will "get to the bottom of it", and that someone will pay the price (someone else). Meanwhile in few days/weeks/months there will be something else to terrorize American citizens with, and 99.9% of citizens will forget about what happened Friday the 13th. Only hope is that we're so close to January and new leadership, that hopefully they won't forget and launch proper investigations. But make no mistake - any other administration if one faulty router would cost $250 million dollars in halting the whole US airspace to stop, at least Sec. would immediately resign!
> In 2008, 72 Iraqi civilians sued L3 Services for human rights violations they had endured at Abu Ghraib and other prisons in Iraq, including "torture; cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment; war crimes; assault and battery; sexual assault and battery; intentional infliction of emotional distress; negligent hiring and supervision; and negligent infliction of emotional distress." A settlement was reached on October 10, 2012, which was the "first positive resolution to a U.S. civil case challenging detainee treatment outside the United States in the larger 'war on terror' context".
> In 2012, L3 subsidiary KDI Precision Products participated in the sale of 11,500 JDAM bomb fuzes to Israel, part of a $647 million contract deal. These were among the weapons used by the IDF in the 2014 Gaza War; the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights highlighted the IDF's weapons usages, which included attacks on densely populated civilian areas, as constituting potential war crimes.
> In June 2022, Chris Kubasik succeeded as the Chair following Bill Brown's retirement. That same month it was reported to have held talks to purchase the Israeli company NSO, which builds Pegasus spyware. White House officials heard of the talks and voiced opposition, resulting in L3Harris discontinuing its plans.
> In October 2025, Israel entered into a memorandum of understanding with L3Harris to facilitate the acquisition of new light attack aircraft intended for border defense, aimed at developing the Israeli Sky Warden variant.
L3Harris is the US military's electronics guy. They make everything electronic and complicated, from handheld radios to motorized camera pods to satellites.
> purchase the Israeli company NSO, which builds Pegasus spyware. White House officials heard of the talks and voiced opposition
Is the implication that an American company would not be able to continue their business model legally? But they could just sell to the government instead, as L3Harris' other zero-day companies do.
Please find a better use for HN than linking the same Wikipedia article over and over again - this is the seventh time you've posted it. It is bannable behavior and not a gratifying use of the site.
U.S. has been leading the way on weaponizing space. We recently refused to join a U.N. resolution prohibiting it.
Warmongering is just a tool the military industrial complex uses to feed itself taxpayer dollars. (Oh and SpaceX is an even bigger player than L3Harris for the record).
U.S. is squarely to blame for any arms race in space.
They are the 6th biggest defense contractor in the US but don't have the same name recognition as the 'big five' (Boeing, RTX, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin - listed in no specific order)
Funny story. Chris Kubasik was the heir apparent at Lockheed but got kicked to the curb when he couldn't keep his dick in his pants at work. Ended up getting the CEO job at L3Harris and then what does he do?
So I bought a Fortigate firewall on ebay some years back for a lab device, I password recovered it to break in and recover it, and it came up registered to them, and still under Enterprise license support for like 6mo. Great, that's exactly what I wanted for a lab device! I looked them up to see they were a defense contractor, ok, so more money than brains. I'll take advantage...
That 6mo came and went, and they renewed the support on it for another year, and my firewall saw the entitlement. Even better, I continued to use it. After 4 years finally the device went EOL/EOS and expired with no more support available, I was sad.
Obviously these guys are fsckheads, more money and contracts from friends in high places than brains. This totally explains why the air system melted down!
What would you prefer to use? What else is there besides PaloAlto that's not even worse? Not saying Fortigates are great but they're the least shit I know of so please elaborate if you know of something better in the enterprise IT space.
Yet somehow Fortigate is everywhere in defense/government. How they manage to make such buggy pathetic devices with near monthly CVEs is beyond me. Oh wait, they have no incentive to improve their quality, they're already everywhere :(
Oh, these are defense contractors, that explains a lot about this non-statement.
I had thought the L3 was from Level 3 Communications and Harris, but its actually L3 Technologies which seems to be a holding company for defense contractors.
L3 Technologies was a large defense contractor that was known for night vision and optics among a number of other things. They merged with Harris to create L3H. They're not a holding company.
> This website uses cookies and similar technologies, which we collectively refer to here as "cookies."[sic] L3Harris uses cookies to improve your experience on our website
Welcome to the world of defense contractors! Here at Raytheon Grumman Dynamic we have business units in all technical domains with engineers, scientists, and technicians of every kind, all organized under the leadership of finance and business majors to maximize shareholder value!
The best part is that one of the entries in the name is usually in some completely unrelated field.
When I learned that the GenCorp in Aerojet GenCorp was a tire manufacturer, the joke in Portal of the portal gun having possible applications as a shower curtain hit a lot harder. Also, the Morton in Morton Thiokol, the company that made the boosters that failed in the Challenger disaster, is the salt company.
personal perspective- L3X has repeatedly demonstrated a corporate culture of accountability allergy. spiderman meme was made for L3. I think it goes up and down the chain
This is standard practice for basically all defense contractors. I don't think there's hardly any of them that strive for excellence, just for next year's contract.
Very surprised because I know several fellow alumni that went on to do extremely technical low level "frontier level" work there. Due to the secret nature of their operations, what they literally do day to day is an angle I don't know much about so maybe its all nonsense but I don't get that feeling.
Defense contractors, as a rule, seem to have a corporate culture of mediocrity and poor performance. But you will find pockets within them that do better, possibly even actually being "frontier level". IT projects, though, are not one of the things they tend to excel at. The FAA stuff as one example, but most IT procurements end up bogged down with years of delays or just failures. It's tradition now.
There are certainly staff members at defense contractors who strive for excellence (I know several personally), but yeah the management culture is pretty fucked. Lots of cases where engineers point out what a bad idea something is, get overruled (because we have a deadline to meet, dammit), and then management acts shocked when it blows up in their faces.
"Modernizing" is a favorite buzzword in government contracting. Moving some app to the cloud and doing nothing else to it? Modernizing. Rewriting the whole thing? Also modernizing. Putting a new API in front of an old system and then leaving the old system around for years? Also modernizing. Modernizing can mean everything and nothing.
I kinda wish they'd take it "very seriously". Corporate communications generally take issues "very seriously". The fact that they're only taking it "seriously" makes me wonder if they're really taking it seriously or not.
We plugged the copper wire into the fiber optic terminal because that's what you do when you upgrade wires.
Unfortunately, light didn't move through the copper wire effectively and some meth heads stole the copper wire we had removed, forcing us to upgrade the whole copper wire wire to fiber optic wires.
Our new fiber optic wires carry much more light than the old copper wires, which will make the FAA system much more responsive in the future.
Fun fact: Copper wires work by carrying light. Well, technically it's much lower wavelength than light, but photons are involved any time a signal travels along a copper wire. See also: virtual photons
This went through so many rounds with their lawyers that I now feel I know less than before I read it.
We can neither confirm nor deny that we have enough information to determine whether or not we messed up.
Makes me wonder why they bothered.
Ending so abrupt. No “apology”. The comms PR team mustve removed something better
> L3Harris takes the nationwide ground stop and its impact on travelers, airlines and air traffic operations seriously.
Not "very seriously." Just "seriously."
> “Which begs the question for us: What did L3Harris do? Did they make mistakes yesterday?” Duffy told reporters. “They own this network. They’re our prime contractor. I can’t go somewhere else. They own it. Or was it a faulty router? And we’re going to find that out. And frankly, we’re going to hold people accountable.”
Someone's gotta educate the asshole that the buck stops at him. He is responsible.
You think he’s personally responsible for a network equipment maintenance failure, for a project that was apparently already 70% complete and which likely started long before he took office? He’s the head of a government agency, not a network tech.
What exactly do you expect him to do? Put yourself in his shoes.
> What exactly do you expect him to do?
Resign.
It happened on his watch.
Why? What good would that do other than make you feel better?
He handled it terribly. His top priorities were spreading blame and kissing the president's ass. God help us if there's a more serious problem with anything while these people are in charge.
What good does it do for him to stay? He hasn't been doing his job, he's been filming a reality show instead. He doesn't deserve his paycheck.
If he leaves maybe Trump would hire a competent replacement instead (unlikely, but can't be much worse than the current Cabinet of Clowns).
That seems like a different reason for him to be fired. If he had a competent boss, I could see that happening, but not with Trump as president. Trump is all about reality TV. He probably wishes more of his cabinet and department heads made it.
Why do you want him to stay? You seem to be awfully keen to defend a man who isn't doing his job and allowed a major ATC failure to occur on his watch. You're all over this thread defending a useless man.
I don’t care if he stays or goes. I care that others, particularly in a forum of engineers (who are supposedly more intelligent than most) are demanding his head for the wrong reasons.
It’s stupid to fire engineers for accidentally causing operational incidents, and it’s similarly stupid to fire their bosses unless they intentionally or negligently set the stage to increase the risk of serious incidents. Mistakes are the fertilizer that bears the fruit of wisdom and experience.
Meanwhile, people here think Jensen Huang should be allowed to return to the helm at Nvidia even though doing so would be about the stupidest act the board could take; doing so would put the entire company at even greater risk of criminal liability.
I went through the whole thread and I totally agree with you. Regardless of anything else, unless there are proper processes in place, blaming an individual becomes just theater. The overall goal for any system failure should be to improve the process, unless the failure was intentional or due to negligence.
I think it is silly to not fire people and yet expect people to still learn from the mistake. If the only downside to taking down the nations ATC is some lawyer composed response, why would anyone be more careful about it in the future? Why wouldn't they take it as a sign that they could play it even faster and looser in the future if there is no downside to them?
I take it you’ve been fired for every mistake you’ve made that resulted in or contributed to an incident, then?
Ive never made a mistake that costs more than I am worth, so no. I would expect if I made a mistake costing millions of dollars or more I would be fired.
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Well, he has been running the DoT for the last 2 years and spent the summer making a sponsored reality tv show.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_American_Road_Trip_(...
Nearly every officer that Trump has appointed this term is unqualified. That doesn’t make them necessarily culpable for everything that happens in their portfolios, especially for projects underway before they took office.
he did 100% what this administration does daily: blamed someone else, reassure they will "get to the bottom of it", and that someone will pay the price (someone else). Meanwhile in few days/weeks/months there will be something else to terrorize American citizens with, and 99.9% of citizens will forget about what happened Friday the 13th. Only hope is that we're so close to January and new leadership, that hopefully they won't forget and launch proper investigations. But make no mistake - any other administration if one faulty router would cost $250 million dollars in halting the whole US airspace to stop, at least Sec. would immediately resign!
I feel sorry for the poor, underpaid network tech that's gonna take the blame for all this.
With any luck it will be recognized as an organizational failure and changes will be made to avoid it rather than punishing any one individual
[flagged]
For those unfamiliar with this company:
> In 2008, 72 Iraqi civilians sued L3 Services for human rights violations they had endured at Abu Ghraib and other prisons in Iraq, including "torture; cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment; war crimes; assault and battery; sexual assault and battery; intentional infliction of emotional distress; negligent hiring and supervision; and negligent infliction of emotional distress." A settlement was reached on October 10, 2012, which was the "first positive resolution to a U.S. civil case challenging detainee treatment outside the United States in the larger 'war on terror' context".
> In 2012, L3 subsidiary KDI Precision Products participated in the sale of 11,500 JDAM bomb fuzes to Israel, part of a $647 million contract deal. These were among the weapons used by the IDF in the 2014 Gaza War; the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights highlighted the IDF's weapons usages, which included attacks on densely populated civilian areas, as constituting potential war crimes.
> In June 2022, Chris Kubasik succeeded as the Chair following Bill Brown's retirement. That same month it was reported to have held talks to purchase the Israeli company NSO, which builds Pegasus spyware. White House officials heard of the talks and voiced opposition, resulting in L3Harris discontinuing its plans.
> In October 2025, Israel entered into a memorandum of understanding with L3Harris to facilitate the acquisition of new light attack aircraft intended for border defense, aimed at developing the Israeli Sky Warden variant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L3Harris
L3Harris is the US military's electronics guy. They make everything electronic and complicated, from handheld radios to motorized camera pods to satellites.
> purchase the Israeli company NSO, which builds Pegasus spyware. White House officials heard of the talks and voiced opposition
Is the implication that an American company would not be able to continue their business model legally? But they could just sell to the government instead, as L3Harris' other zero-day companies do.
Has L3Harris anything to do with Harris Radio?
L3Harris is the merger of L3 and Harris. Yes, they still make radios.
They're definitely straining the imagination wrt creativity in coming up with that name.
They are also behind Golden Dome -- putting offensive weapons into orbit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...
Please find a better use for HN than linking the same Wikipedia article over and over again - this is the seventh time you've posted it. It is bannable behavior and not a gratifying use of the site.
I would not classify a missile than intercepts other missiles as offensive.
Trump said it can do "left of launch" ground strikes
Very similar to this, which SpaceX was also involved in:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Falcon_Project
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U.S. has been leading the way on weaponizing space. We recently refused to join a U.N. resolution prohibiting it.
Warmongering is just a tool the military industrial complex uses to feed itself taxpayer dollars. (Oh and SpaceX is an even bigger player than L3Harris for the record).
U.S. is squarely to blame for any arms race in space.
They are the 6th biggest defense contractor in the US but don't have the same name recognition as the 'big five' (Boeing, RTX, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin - listed in no specific order)
Funny story. Chris Kubasik was the heir apparent at Lockheed but got kicked to the curb when he couldn't keep his dick in his pants at work. Ended up getting the CEO job at L3Harris and then what does he do?
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/17/l3harris-ceo-chris-kubasik-l...
> don't have the same name recognition as the 'big five
Well, as they say, all publicity is good publicity?
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Ahh, these frigging guys...
So I bought a Fortigate firewall on ebay some years back for a lab device, I password recovered it to break in and recover it, and it came up registered to them, and still under Enterprise license support for like 6mo. Great, that's exactly what I wanted for a lab device! I looked them up to see they were a defense contractor, ok, so more money than brains. I'll take advantage...
That 6mo came and went, and they renewed the support on it for another year, and my firewall saw the entitlement. Even better, I continued to use it. After 4 years finally the device went EOL/EOS and expired with no more support available, I was sad.
Obviously these guys are fsckheads, more money and contracts from friends in high places than brains. This totally explains why the air system melted down!
I think just the fact they used Fortigate means that
What would you prefer to use? What else is there besides PaloAlto that's not even worse? Not saying Fortigates are great but they're the least shit I know of so please elaborate if you know of something better in the enterprise IT space.
Pin alternatives on a dartboard, throw a dart to select one, and you're still better off.
Palo Alto, Sophos, Cisco, Juniper, UniFi... Anything except maybe Barracuda.
Sophos is a bug riddled mess and UniFi is prosumer at best, in no world are they better than Fortigate
Yet somehow Fortigate is everywhere in defense/government. How they manage to make such buggy pathetic devices with near monthly CVEs is beyond me. Oh wait, they have no incentive to improve their quality, they're already everywhere :(
Oh, these are defense contractors, that explains a lot about this non-statement.
I had thought the L3 was from Level 3 Communications and Harris, but its actually L3 Technologies which seems to be a holding company for defense contractors.
FYI, CenturyLink bought Level3 something like 10 years ago and then re-branded as Lumen during COVID.
L3 Technologies was a large defense contractor that was known for night vision and optics among a number of other things. They merged with Harris to create L3H. They're not a holding company.
All the big defense companies look a bit like holding companies with a bunch of differently focused 'business units' under the same umbrella.
> This website uses cookies and similar technologies, which we collectively refer to here as "cookies."[sic] L3Harris uses cookies to improve your experience on our website
Great first impression from a technical company
L3Harris is a legal-financial instrument formed from the remains of former technical companies
Welcome to the world of defense contractors! Here at Raytheon Grumman Dynamic we have business units in all technical domains with engineers, scientists, and technicians of every kind, all organized under the leadership of finance and business majors to maximize shareholder value!
The best part is that one of the entries in the name is usually in some completely unrelated field. When I learned that the GenCorp in Aerojet GenCorp was a tire manufacturer, the joke in Portal of the portal gun having possible applications as a shower curtain hit a lot harder. Also, the Morton in Morton Thiokol, the company that made the boosters that failed in the Challenger disaster, is the salt company.
> L3Harris takes the nationwide ground stop and its impact on travelers, airlines and air traffic operations seriously.
Thank goodness
I mean they could have taken it humorously I guess.
The difference is hard to notice these days. And with Thanksgiving madness coming up, fingers crossed!
Lmao "Our lawyers advised us to be serious about this, but imma keep it a stack this is hilarious."
I guess it’s technically a statement, even though it says nothing.
It's a technical statement
At least they didn't run it through an LLM, so it could take three times linger to say nothing.
personal perspective- L3X has repeatedly demonstrated a corporate culture of accountability allergy. spiderman meme was made for L3. I think it goes up and down the chain
This is standard practice for basically all defense contractors. I don't think there's hardly any of them that strive for excellence, just for next year's contract.
Very surprised because I know several fellow alumni that went on to do extremely technical low level "frontier level" work there. Due to the secret nature of their operations, what they literally do day to day is an angle I don't know much about so maybe its all nonsense but I don't get that feeling.
Defense contractors, as a rule, seem to have a corporate culture of mediocrity and poor performance. But you will find pockets within them that do better, possibly even actually being "frontier level". IT projects, though, are not one of the things they tend to excel at. The FAA stuff as one example, but most IT procurements end up bogged down with years of delays or just failures. It's tradition now.
Yeah I was referring more to low level EE and CS related work. Its possible IT implementation is a different story.
Yes, to be clear I'm not trying to throw shade on the engineers working for defense contractors, but rather the business model and practice itself.
Failing to deliver is rewarded. Even in this instance, we see Sec Duffy asking for $50B to give to L3H because they failed so spectacularly.
These companies keep delivering edsels and our government's response is to double the investment on every failure.
There are certainly staff members at defense contractors who strive for excellence (I know several personally), but yeah the management culture is pretty fucked. Lots of cases where engineers point out what a bad idea something is, get overruled (because we have a deadline to meet, dammit), and then management acts shocked when it blows up in their faces.
They strive for compliance, and nothing more, because anything more would be non-compliant.
By "modernizing" they mean making it equivalently fragile and flaky to such modern wonders as Github and Microsoft 363?
"Modernizing" is a favorite buzzword in government contracting. Moving some app to the cloud and doing nothing else to it? Modernizing. Rewriting the whole thing? Also modernizing. Putting a new API in front of an old system and then leaving the old system around for years? Also modernizing. Modernizing can mean everything and nothing.
Swapping out old problems for new ones is a great way to climb the ranks among government accounts payable though
> 363
LOL nice
I'm glad they're taking this seriously
I kinda wish they'd take it "very seriously". Corporate communications generally take issues "very seriously". The fact that they're only taking it "seriously" makes me wonder if they're really taking it seriously or not.
Its like the people who are 101% committed dont sound as dedicated as the people that are 200% committed.
If they did it wouldn't crash
Let he who has never failed at an important task raise his hand.
We plugged the copper wire into the fiber optic terminal because that's what you do when you upgrade wires.
Unfortunately, light didn't move through the copper wire effectively and some meth heads stole the copper wire we had removed, forcing us to upgrade the whole copper wire wire to fiber optic wires.
Our new fiber optic wires carry much more light than the old copper wires, which will make the FAA system much more responsive in the future.
Thank you very much and have a nice day.
Fun fact: Copper wires work by carrying light. Well, technically it's much lower wavelength than light, but photons are involved any time a signal travels along a copper wire. See also: virtual photons
It could be FTL and FAA systems would still be just as responsive