Newark air traffic controllers lost radar and comms for 90 seconds in horrifying FAA outage
Air traffic controllers overseeing Newark Liberty International Airport experienced a horrifying 90-second blackout in radar and communications caused by a fried piece of copper wire, a source familiar with the incident told The Post.
The April 28 failure — which left Federal Aviation Administration workers with no eyes or ears — resulted in many controllers at the Philadelphia-based center to take trauma leave, according to the National Air Traffic Controllers Association union.
United Airlines has blamed 20% of FAA workers “walking off the job” as a result of the failure for the cascading delays at the airport — the second busiest in the New York area — that led to the carrier canceling dozens of flights a day.
“Air traffic controllers in Area C of the Philadelphia TRACON (PHL), who are responsible for separating and sequencing aircraft in and out of Newark Airport (EWR), temporarily lost radar and communications with the aircraft under their control, unable to see, hear, or talk to them,” an NATCA spokesperson said in a statement.
The employees took leave under the Federal Employees Compensation Act, which covers all federal employees that are physically injured or experience a traumatic event on the job.
Newark airport has experienced more than 400 cancelled flights and nearly 2,000 delays since Friday.
At a press conference Monday, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called for an Inspector General investigation into the travel nightmare at an airport which served 49 million travelers last year.
“The technology is old and must be updated. One of the things that happened at Newark is a copper wire burnt. Why are we using copper wire in 2025? Have they heard of fiber?” the Senate minority leader said.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy also pinned the glut of delays at Newark airport on the outdated air traffic management system.
“We use floppy disks. We use copper wires,” he said. “The system that we’re using is not effective to control the traffic that we have in the airspace today.”
In a letter to customers, United CEO Scott Kirby said Newark airport’s air traffic control center — which was moved to Philadelphia last summer in an effort to ease congestion at other New York-area airports — has been “chronically understaffed for years,” and also pointed to the technology failure as the culprit for the cascading delays.
He announced United — which makes up around 75% of Newark’s flight traffic — was removing 35 daily roundtrip flights from the schedule, claiming 20% of Newark’s air traffic controllers “walked off the job” as a result of the failure, a characterization NATCA flatly denied.
