Newark Airport systems outage was ‘most dangerous situation,’ air traffic controller says
By Pete Muntean, Rene Marsh, TuAnh Dam, Amanda Musa, CNN
(CNN) — The air traffic system meltdown at Newark Liberty International Airport last week “was the most dangerous situation you could have,” according to an air traffic controller on duty that day, as the fallout from the outage stretches into a second week.
The drop in communications at the Philadelphia air traffic control facility on April 28 has resulted in thousands of canceled flights and brought renewed scrutiny on the airport’s outdated air traffic control system as multiple controllers take trauma leave amid a national shortage of workers in the crucial role.
Flights arriving to Newark – one of the United States’ busiest airpoirts – were experiencing an average delay of four hours as of Tuesday evening, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, which has indicated it expects the disruption to continue.
The air traffic controller, who spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity, said he arrived back from a break to find his coworkers recovering from a 60- to 90-second-long outage during which they could not see planes on radar scopes or communicate with pilots.
“I don’t want to say panic because panic isn’t the right word, but it was hectic,” the controller said. “We were trying to figure out what’s working, what’s not.”
The outage impacted information from radars located at an FAA facility in Westbury, New York, where the air traffic controllers formerly managed flights heading to Newark. Control over the airspace was transferred to Philadelphia last July. The radars are now operated using a remote line that one source described as “a long extension cord.”
The air traffic controller attributed the failure to a single data feed that connects the old facility to the new facility.
“It basically doesn’t have redundancy,” he said. “We’re under the impression that there’s a single stream that’s coming in that carries both (radar and radio communication).”
The feed had gone down at least twice before, according to the controller.
In one incident, he said controllers were unable to communicate with the crew of a FedEx MD-11, which overshot the final approach path into Newark and into the busy airspace over LaGuardia.
“It was just by the grace of God that there wasn’t another plane in his way,” he said.
‘Takes a toll’
About 15 to 20 flights were being controlled by Newark Liberty approach controllers when communication and radar went down on April 28, according to an analysis by flight tracking site Flightradar24.
The number is based on the altitude of aircraft bound for and departing Newark and audio from the approach radio frequency, Ian Petchenik, the director of communications for the site, told CNN.
The system used to manage air traffic at Newark is “incredibly old,” according to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. “We use floppy disks. We use copper wires,” he said on Friday. “The system that we’re using is not effective to control the traffic that we have in the airspace today.”
On Monday, Duffy told Fox News that controllers lost primary communication, and the backup line did not immediately take over.
A source told CNN the situation was like driving with a blindfold on.
“Imagine driving down the highway in traffic and someone puts blindfold over your eyes and tells you to keep driving and when you come back from driving dark you have to figure out what to do next,” the source said.
Colin Scoggins, a former air traffic controller and retired military specialist at the FAA, told CNN that losing both radar and communications on the job can be a scary experience.
“If you cannot talk to a pilot, then you’re really in trouble,” he said. “I would find it very traumatic.”
Air traffic control conversations recorded by the website LiveATC.net highlighted the tense moments between a controller and a pilot trying to land.
“You’re sitting there watching the situation unfold, kind of like on 911, you see situations unfold that you have no control over. And when you’re a controller, you want to be in control. When you take that away, it can be very traumatic,” Scoggins said.
Five FAA employees – a supervisor, three controllers and one trainee – took 45 days of trauma leave after the outage, according to the air traffic controller.
“This stuff takes a toll on you, especially when we keep saying this is going to happen again, it’s going to happen again, and it seems to fall on deaf ears,” he said.
Aviation analyst Miles O’Brien told CNN that the controllers did what they could in a potentially dangerous situation.
“I think, as I always say, that the controllers, the individuals who run this system daily, perform quiet heroic acts, in spite of a system that is built to set them up for failure. I believe in those people doing their job, but there’s only so much stress they can take,” he said.
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
