For the past 10 days, US travelers have been watching chaos unfold at Newark airport. The week-plus of disruptions began on April 28, when a loss in communications and radar at the airport’s air traffic control tower kicked off a ripple effect of mass delays and cancellations, impacting thousands of travelers.
The situation at New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport has since improved slightly: On May 9, there were 141 delays and 66 cancellations at the air travel hub by 9:30 a.m., according to FlightAware. Meanwhile, inbound flights faced delays of about two hours at their airports of origin.
One of the driving factors behind the havoc at Newark is a shortage of air traffic controllers. The US air travel system currently needs to hire about 3,000 air traffic controllers to reach full staffing levels, according to Airlines for America, an industry lobby group.
As the peak summer travel season approaches, one question on the minds of many travelers right now is if the situation at Newark could repeat itself at other airports around the country. Fortunately, one expert says that’s “absolutely not” likely to happen.
Although the air traffic controller shortage is ongoing nationwide, the issues facing Newark are locally unique, according to Michael McCormick, professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and a former air traffic controller. “What happened at Newark was specific to Newark because it involves the move of the approach control from Long Island to Philadelphia,” he tells Condé Nast Traveler.
In July 2024, Newark’s air traffic operations, called “approach control” in industry parlance, were moved to Philadelphia International Airport in an attempt to shore up staffing levels. “The New York approach control has been chronically understaffed, and it’s been that way since the controller strike in 1981,” McCormick says. “So to mitigate that, they decided to move the approach control from Westbury, Long Island, down to Philadelphia because Philadelphia has not had a problem either attracting, training, or retaining air traffic controllers.”
But in order to move the control center from Long Island to Philadelphia, the airport needed more complicated equipment. So, the FAA set up radio and radar relays to enable planes in Newark’s airspace to be tracked by controllers in Philadelphia, McCormick explains.
This relay equipment, which is unique to Newark airport, sends radar and radio communication from Newark’s old air traffic control center in Long Island to the new location in Philadelphia. The technology relies on old hardware like floppy disks and copper wires that have proven to be antiquated and spotty.
On April 28, the technology experienced an outage for about 90 seconds, according to Bloomberg. During the blackout, controllers were unable to see or speak to planes arriving into Newark’s airspace. Then on May 9 at around 3:55 a.m., a second blackout occurred at the Philadelphia facility, which also lasted for about 90 seconds, ABC News reported.
“There have been intermittent [episodes] where they would lose radio communication, and then last Monday they lost radar information as well as a result of that,” McCormick says. “Whenever you have a loss of communication capability and/or radar, it really impacts the ability for air traffic controllers to provide service to the aircraft. So that’s why it can quickly result in a situation where it’s chaotic, and the controllers and the pilots have to really resort to creative ways to overcome the problem.” Because the radar and radio communications went out at different times, for example, controllers were able to alert some flights that they had lost radar and that pilots should contact other towers along the way, CNN reported.
