Technology outages at the air traffic control facility that oversees approaches and departures from Newark Airport have caused workers to take leaves of absence, the FAA has confirmed.
In turn, those missing employees are contributing to ongoing operational challenges in Newark that have led hub carrier United Airlines to cancel 35 flights from its daily schedule for an indeterminate time period.
"Frequent equipment and telecommunications outages can be stressful for controllers," the FAA said. "Some controllers at the Philadelphia TRACON who work Newark arrivals and departures have taken 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."
Shortly before 2 p.m. local time on May 6, departures at Newark were delayed an average of 244 minutes, the FAA said, citing ongoing runway construction as the reason. There had been 62 cancellations of May 6 departures from Newark, amounting to 12% of the daily schedule, according to flight tracker FlightAware.
Those operational challenges follow more than a week in which Newark flyers have endured a stream of heavy delays on top of numerous cancellations, many of them that the FAA attributes to staffing shortages in air traffic control. On May 5, 79 flights were canceled at Newark and another 193 were delayed. Newark also had more than 70 cancellations on April 28 and May 4. On May 1, 102 departures and 109 arrivals were canceled at Newark.
A variety of factors are driving Newark's failings. The airport, even under its standard day-to-day operations, is capacity-challenged. That situation has led the FAA since the fall of 2023 to allow airlines to fly up to 10% fewer flights at Newark than would typically be required in order to retain their allotment of daily departure and landing rights.
Runway construction is also substantially impacting traffic flow at Newark, especially when there's adverse weather conditions.
But the issue of biggest concern is the technology failures at the Philadelphia TRACON, which begin managing Newark operations last summer.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the facility lost radar and radio communications with aircraft approaching Newark for 90 seconds on the afternoon April 28, forcing planes into a holding pattern.
The incident so rattled controllers working that shift that four have taken short-term trauma leave, the Wall Street Journal said. Leaves can last up to 45 days. Controllers' radios went out again for a brief time later in the week.
The failures are the result of the antiquated U.S. air traffic control system, according to the FAA. According to a September 2024 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, 58 unsustainable or potentially unsustainable FAA systems have "critical operational impacts on the safety and efficiency of the national airspace."
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has aggressively called for funding to modernize the U.S. air traffic control system since assuming the post in January. The 2025-26 budget proposal put forward by the White House late last week requests $5 billion for national airspace system upgrades, including a $450 million down payment on a multiyear, multibillion-dollar radar-replacement program. Duffy has also said he intends to ask Congress for a tens of billions of dollars to upgrade the U.S. air traffic control system.
And last week, Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.) proposed $15 billion in new funding for air traffic control upgrades.
"The technology that we are using is old. That's what is causing the outages and delays we are seeing at Newark," Duffy said in a May 2 post on X. "If we don't act, we will start to see these issues across the national airspace."
Such an overhaul, though, would take years. In the meantime, the FAA says that it is working to ensure the current telecommunications equipment is more reliable in the New York area. In addition, the agency says it is updating its automation system to improve resiliency.