On June 2nd, US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy traveled to Newark Liberty International Airport to celebrate the reopening of runway 4L-22R. This was unusual: few runway openings are glamorous enough to warrant a visit from the airport’s CEO, let alone a cabinet secretary. But as we reported last month, few airports have come to symbolize USDOT’s mismanagement of the air traffic control system as much as Newark.
The ceremony and press conference was meant to transform Newark into a different symbol — one of progress and action. In his speech, Duffy positioned Newark’s problems as solvable, and the people onstage — who included the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)’s Acting Administrator Chris Rocheleau, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby, and several other dignitaries — as the problem-solvers.
Together, they’d gotten union labor to rebuild a runway in 47 days instead of 60; they’d convinced Verizon to expedite a new fiber-optic cable; they’d identified and fixed the “glitch in the system” that left Newark’s air traffic controllers blind and unable to speak to pilots for several terrifying minutes.
Because of this whirlwind of activity, Rocheleau expected that Newark would soon be able to increase its flight volume by 25 percent, or nearly 12 additional flights per hour.
Or, as Kirby put it, “This is such a seminal turning point for not just the near term but the long term of Newark.”
Within two days, all three men were proven wrong. On the evening of June 4th, a shortage of air traffic controllers forced Newark to issue a ground stop, delaying more than 100 flights for several hours. Another staffing-related delay occurred four days later. Optimism alone cannot solve infrastructure problems that have been decades in the making.
Especially when they are far more widespread than most people realize. Besides the three days of crisis at Newark — on April 28th, May 1st, and May 9th — there have been at least a dozen instances where equipment or staffing problems significantly affected operations at air traffic control centers around the country this year.
The most serious incidents occurred at air traffic control facilities in Kansas City in January, Oakland in February, and Denver in May. Each time, controllers were unable to see or communicate with pilots after radar and radio failures. The Denver outage lasted for only 90 seconds, but the others persisted for more than an hour. Each one resulted in widespread delays and cancellations.
In March at Baltimore’s Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI), an electrical fire blamed on “overloaded aging equipment” halted operations for more than two hours, leading to 50 flight cancellations and more than 150 delays.
And twice this year, the FAA’s Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system — a real-time database of every flying hazard and traffic advisory that covers the entirety of American airspace — has gone down for several hours at a time, leading to more than 1,300 delays and cancellations.
... continue reading