Extended issues at a popular airport in a crowded metropolitan area are never a good thing for travelers, airline employees or air traffic controllers. That’s been the case at Newark Liberty International Airport for much of this month, including an air traffic control system outage that had much wider repercussions. The chaos that ensued prompted United Airlines — for whom Newark is a significant hub — to make it significantly easier for travelers flying in or out of Newark to change their flights.
On Friday, things took another bad turn. Writing at The New York Times, Niraj Chokshi reported that the airport was affected by another brief outage on Friday morning. This one lasted for 90 seconds and found the air traffic controllers appealing to the crew of a FedEx flight that was affected by the outage.
“Our scopes just went black again. If you care about this, contact your airline and try to get some pressure for them to fix this stuff,” one air traffic controller told the FedEx flight crew, according to the Times.
In a post on their official social media accounts, the Federal Aviation Administration provided more details on the incident. “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 agency stated. “The outage occurred around 3:55 a.m. on Friday, May 9 and lasted approximately 90 seconds.”
The brief system outage wasn’t the only issue affecting Newark Airport on Friday. As PIX11 reported, the FAA lifted its ground stop to the airport that morning; nonetheless, because of adverse weather conditions, hours-long delays remained for some flights. Overall, according to NBC New York, the airport experienced close to 300 flight delays on Friday, raising the total number of delayed and cancelled flights at Newark to 1,700 for the week.
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Lithium batteies are still a fire riskIt’s a frustrating period for travelers in the New York area. (As someone with multiple family members flying into Newark in the coming days, I’m very aware of this.) If there is one bright spot here — and that’s using a very loose definition of the term — it’s that these events aren’t likely to recur elsewhere.
Writing at Condé Nast Traveler, Jessica Puckett spoke with one former air traffic controller who made a convincing case that this issue is singular. “What happened at Newark was specific to Newark because it involves the move of the approach control from Long Island to Philadelphia,” said aviation expert Michael McCormick. It’s not much comfort if you’re dealing with a delayed or cancelled flight in or out of Newark, but at least the issue is confined.
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