Amid reports of more trouble at the bustling airport, a ground stop was put in place until at least 11:15 a.m. due to taxiway construction. The FAA also said…
The FAA confirmed yet another instance of air traffic controllers briefly losing radar in the early morning hours of the day. According to the federal agency, the outage occurred around 4 a.m. and last approximately 90 seconds.
"There was a telecommunications outage that impacted communications and radar display at Philadelphia TRACON Area C, which guides aircraft in and out of Newark Liberty International Airport airspace," the FAA shared in a statement. Hours later, a ground stop was put in place until at least 11:15 a.m. due to taxiway construction. On top of that stoppage, the FAA's traffic monitoring program showed that incoming flights were being delayed by nearly two hours.This comes a week after controllers in Area C of the Philadelphia TRACON, which guides flights in and out of Newark, lost all communication on April 28 with the pilots bound for that airport — a near-disaster that is now under investigation. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on Monday that contact between the air traffic controller and planes was lost for “30 seconds.” He told Fox News no planes were in danger of crashing.“That’s 90 seconds of a wholly filled-up sky of planes literally flying blind over one of America’s busiest airports,” New York Sen. Chuck Schumer said Tuesday in Washington. “Thank God nothing happened, but we tempt fate if no changes are made." Recordings released Tuesday by LiveATC.net offered some insight into how the air traffic controllers and pilots were able to work through the crisis and avert what could have been a major tragedy outside one of the nation’s busiest air travel hubs. “I am going to move you here because I just got told that the approach lost all the radars," an air traffic controller could be heard telling the pilot of United Airlines Flight 2243 on one of the recordings."Three of the four radar screens went black, and they have no frequencies.” “I don't want to see people lose their lives because we have an air traffic control system that fails,” the transportation secretary said Thursday on a visit to the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City.This back-and-forth does not convey the fear air traffic controllers were feeling at the moment they were trying to get 15 to 20 flights safely into the airport while the systems were down, the whistleblowing controller said. “It was like time stood still for a while," the controller said. “It was a scary moment when we tried to reach these planes and we couldn’t.” The controller said the communications breakdown did not feel as long as 90 seconds but"felt like 45 seconds to me," as they dealt with the crisis calmly.The FAA on Wednesday released a statement laying out the next steps to fix some of the equipment and staffing issues that have plagued EWR in recent days. "The FAA is taking immediate steps to improve the reliability of operations at Newark Liberty International Airport. This includes accelerating technological and logistical improvements and increasing air traffic controller staffing," the FAA said. The FAA said the controllers who handle Newark's airspace are based in Philadelphia but the system that processes radar data is based in New York, with telecom lines feeding the data to the controllers in Philly. To help fix some of the communication issues, the FAA said it is added new communications between the two centers and replacing connections with updated fiberoptic technology for greater speed. Controller staffing is also a priority, Duffy has said, and the FAA said it has 21 controllers and supervisors in training specifically for the Newark airspace operations center with a pipeline of classes filled through July 2026.
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