Radar and telecommunications systems for Newark Airport’s air traffic controllers failed Friday morning — the second time the two critical systems went down at the same time in less than two weeks — as delays at the critical hub continue to vex travelers.
According to a statement issued by the Federal Aviation Administration, both the radar display and some portion of the communication systems that allow controllers to reach pilots and local airport control towers failed for “approximately 90 seconds” around 3:55 a.m.
The outage affected systems at the Philadelphia facility known as “Philadelphia TRACON” — an acronym for Terminal Radar Approach Control — specifically those used by controllers responsible for guiding planes into and out of airports in northern New Jersey.
It was unclear Friday evening to what degree ground-to-plane communications were affected.
But during the radar outage, air traffic controllers could be heard telling a FedEx plane that their screens had gone dark, ABC News reported.
In another transmission, a controller informed the crew of a private jet about the radar outage and instructed the pilot to remain at or above 3,000 feet in case the controllers were unable to make contact during the aircraft’s descent, ABC said.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) — who has called on the DOT’s inspector general to look into New York and Philly TRACON’s short staffing and infrastructural issues — expressed his skepticism.
“This is an air travel safety emergency that requires immediate and decisive action, not a promise of a big, beautiful unfunded overhaul that will take years to begin to implement,” he said in a statement.
“Enough is enough. The connection between New York air space and the Philadelphia air traffic control center must be fixed now,” he added. “The skies over New York City are some of the busiest in the world.
“This cannot happen again.”
The meltdown came on the heels of an April 28 outage at Philly TRACON, in which radar coverage of North Jersey airspace and telecommunications lines between controllers and local airport towers failed.
That outage effectively shut down one of the nation’s busiest airports for approximately two hours, and led to days of cancellations, delays and headaches for travelers.
As previously reported by the Daily News, radar feeds for the North Jersey airspace go to New York TRACON on Long Island — which managed the airspace above Newark until last summer.
Currently, the feeds are then relayed from Long Island down to Philly, a setup that leads to frequent latency and outage issues.
Following the April 28 outage, five of the 25 air traffic controllers certified to manage the airspace over North Jersey took 45-day trauma leave, according to a spokesman for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.
That 20% reduction in staffing caused its own set of delays at Newark, which have continued for nearly two weeks.
The delays and cancellations at Newark continued on Friday, exacerbated by maintenance work and poor weather.
The FAA issued a seemingly unrelated “ground stop” late Friday morning due to taxiway construction, which lasted roughly an hour.
By 5 p.m., 140 flights had been canceled at Newark Liberty, and more than 400 had been delayed, according to data from the flight-tracking website FlightAware.
The miserable travel conditions in the nation’s busiest airspace — where more than 100 planes a day have been canceled for nearly two weeks — has put a spotlight on chronic understaffing of the nation’s air traffic control systems as well as the aging infrastructure upon which they rely.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced Thursday that his department would be working “to build a brand new, state-of-the-art air traffic control system that will be the envy of the world.”
Those efforts are supposed to include a total overhaul of the telecommunications system, the replacement of 618 radar facilities, and hardware and software upgrades at TRACON and air traffic control center facilities nationwide.
Late Friday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt acknowledged the “glitch in the system” at Newark, but said it had nothing to do with the delays.
“That glitch was caused by the same telecoms and software issues that were raised last week,” she said. “Everything went back online after the brief outage, and there was no operational impact.”
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