Air traffic controllers at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey were without radar for around a minute and a half Friday morning, leaving staffers without critical safety systems at the nation’s 13th-busiest airport for the second time in two weeks.
In a statement, the Federal Aviation Administration said the outage began at 3:55 a.m. and affected a radar approach control facility that guides aircraft in and out of the Newark airspace.
“There was a telecommunications outage that impacted communications and radar display at Philadelphia TRACON Area C,” the FAA said. “The outage occurred around 3:55 a.m. on Friday, May 9, and lasted approximately 90 seconds.”
The same facility experienced a similar outage on April 28. During that 90-second outage, air traffic controllers in Philadelphia who supervise Newark-bound flights were “unable to see, hear or talk” to the aircraft they were supposed to be guiding.
United Airlines cut 35 daily flights from the airport last week as the flight delays became a persistent issue. In a letter to customers, United CEO Scott Kirby said runway construction at the airport and chronic understaffing have compounded the issue.
“This particular air traffic control facility has been chronically understaffed for years and without these controllers, it’s now clear — and the FAA tells us — that Newark airport cannot handle the number of planes that are scheduled to operate there in the weeks and months ahead,” Kirby wrote.
Former air traffic controllers told The Associated Press after last week’s outage that, while troubling, a complete communication blackout doesn’t mean passengers are in immediate danger.
“If the pilot doesn’t respond right away, you don’t have them set up where they could collide,” said Jordan Morales, a 12-year veteran who left the job in 2022.
Morales added that other radar approach facilities can step in if one goes down. The airplanes themselves also have technology onboard to alert them to surrounding traffic.
The snafu comes one day after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy pledged a multibillion-dollar plan to update the nation’s systems, though details on the proposal have been scarce.
The Trump administration fired around 400 FAA employees en masse in February at the urging of billionaire Trump ally Elon Musk’s purported government cost-saving initiative, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
The FAA’s previous administrator, Mike Whitaker, stepped down on Inauguration Day, also under pressure from Musk.
At the same time, Musk ― who is still working as a special government employee at the White House ― has pushed the FAA to award his satellite internet company, Starlink, a lucrative multibillion-dollar contract to update FAA communications systems.
“The Verizon system is not working and so is putting air travelers at serious risk,” Musk posted online in February, referring to a contract Verizon was awarded in 2023 to update the system with fiber optic cables.
Government employees, contractors and people familiar with the work told the AP that Starlink equipment had already been installed in some FAA facilities, with very limited transparency as to how it was done.