CNN’s aviation correspondent on Tuesday told travelers to expect continued chaos at New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport, one of the country’s busiest air travel hubs, amid nine straight days of widespread delays and cancellations.

“There is no end in sight right now,” Pete Muntean, a pilot and flight instructor, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.

Muntean said the Federal Aviation Administration hasn’t found a “near-term solution” after air traffic controllers lost contact with planes arriving to and leaving from the airport for about 90 seconds on April 28. The incident led several employees to go on leave from the Philadelphia-based facility that supervises Newark’s air traffic.

The FAA, in a statement to HuffPost this week, confirmed that some employees at the Philadelphia facility took time off to “recover from the stress of multiple recent outages.”

“While we cannot quickly replace them due to this highly specialized profession, we continue to train controllers who will eventually be assigned to this busy airspace,” the agency said.

“When staffing or equipment issues occur, the FAA will ensure safety by slowing the rate of arrivals into the airport.”

Muntean noted that the FAA can’t “drag and drop” air traffic controllers from another location into handling Newark as it’s a “very specialized” profession.

Air traffic controllers have lost contact with pilots at least twice at the airport since August, a veteran air traffic controller told NBC News.

Muntean said there’s still a nationwide shortage of 3,000 air traffic controllers and, while Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy plans to “radically transform” the air traffic control system, there’s “no real way out” for the FAA to get controllers into the facility in the short term.

Muntean stressed that the controllers are essentially “stuck in a dark room with a radar scope and the radio,” the “only way” they have to see planes and communicate with them.

“This is not like controllers in a tower, where they can look out a window and see what’s going on. And so, when they don’t have those resources available to them, they are pretty well hosed,” Muntean said.

“It’s pretty hard for them to do this job. And so they’re essentially doing the job blind. They need these resources, and this is something that the FAA really has to fix in the immediate.”

H/T: Raw Story