Another equipment outage has triggered a 45-minute ground stop for Newark Liberty International Airport-bound flights, marking the third major failure in two weeks.
The latest glitch on Sunday morning follows a 90-second radar blackout Friday, and a radar and radio meltdown on April 28 that forced five air-traffic controllers to take trauma leave, and led to more than 1,000 flight cancellations.
“There was a telecommunications issue at Philadelphia TRACON Area C, which guides aircraft in and out of Newark Liberty International Airport airspace,” the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement. “The FAA briefly slowed aircraft in and out of the airport while we ensured redundancies were working as designed.”
The ground stop meant flights heading to Newark could not take off. By 11:30 a.m. on Sunday, more than 80 flights had been canceled and nearly 90 flights had been delayed, according to FlightAware. The FAA said operations had returned to normal.
The airport has been rocked by equipment failures and staffing issues in recent weeks, causing an average of 34 arrival cancellations per day since mid-April. But incidents where Newark approach controllers lost radar or radio service date back to last year, according to CNN.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has announced plans to reduce the number of flights in and out of Newark to ease pressure on the system. He has said, “I think Newark is safe, I fly to that airport all the time.”
The Trump administration on Thursday proposed a multibillion-dollar overhaul of the air-traffic control system, calling for six new control centers and tech upgrades at all air traffic facilities nationwide.
“Listen, the system is old, right?” Duffy said of Newark Liberty International Airport’s equipment during an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday. “This is a system that’s 25, at best, sometimes 50 years old.”
He blamed “Congress and the country” for neglecting aging infrastructure at airports. “What you see in Newark is going to happen in other places across the country,” he predicted, adding, “It has to be fixed.”
