Loops in the sky: See the chaos caused by Newark’s April radar shutdown

By Matt Stiles and Curt Merrill, CNN

(CNN) — At least 16 commercial planes were likely being tracked by Newark approach controllers when the airport’s communication and radar went down on April 28, including at least eight that were diverted to nearby airports, according to a CNN analysis of data from the tracking site Flightradar24.

The resulting chaos is evident in those flight paths after controllers lost the ability to see planes on radar scopes and couldn’t communicate with pilots. The ripple effects of the communications problems lasted for more than a week, disrupting flight schedules with delays and cancellations.

The incident is one of at least three communications failures at Newark since the Federal Aviation Administration moved controllers overseeing flights at the airport from a Long Island facility to a new location in Philadelphia, including another outage on May 9.

The below animation shows those April 28 flights — identified by Flightradar24 as likely being controlled by Newark — during the 90 minutes after the system failure that began at around 1:30 p.m. ET.

Those flight records show several of the affected aircraft flying in oval-shaped loops at different altitudes across the region before eventually touching down at other airports, including JFK, New York Stewart, Wilkes-Barre/Scranton and others.

See some of those holding patterns in these maps:

Flight operations at Newark — one of the nation’s busiest airports — appeared to be slowly returning to normal throughout this past week, but controllers experienced another blackout in the early morning hours on May 9.

The blackout included losing radar for about 90 seconds at Newark Terminal Radar Approach Control at 3:55 a.m. local time, according to the FAA.

The airport typically has around more than 500 departures per day, and hundreds were cancelled in the last week.

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CNN’s Pete Muntean and Renée Rigdon contributed to this report.