The Slow-Rolling Crisis at America’s Airports
The Slow-Rolling Crisis at America’s Airports
Newark’s Liberty International Airport was a “national embarrassment” long before Drudge branded it one. The transit hub has made additional contributions to that reputation recently, albeit not entirely as a result of its own inherent dysfunction and aesthetic repulsiveness.
NBC News senior correspondent Tom Costello informed the network’s viewers recently of a conversation he had with one of the New Jersey airport’s air traffic controllers, which was sufficient to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. “It is not a safe situation right now for the flying public,” Costello said, relating the advice he received from his harried source. “Don’t fly into Newark. Avoid Newark at all costs.”
Newark has its own unique problems that have culminated in guaranteed flight delays of two hours or more and canceled trips. One of its three runways is out of service for maintenance until at least mid-June, throttling traffic and complicating the ballet in the skies for air traffic controllers all over the country and the world.
That isn’t the only problem afflicting this particular airport. Via the New York Daily News:
Sources told The News that five of the 25 controllers assigned to the Newark airspace took a leave of absence, a 20% reduction in the workforce. The reduced number of controllers has made it difficult for Newark keep flights on schedule, leading to the week of delays, and leading United to pull 10% of their flights from the airport.
The situation does, indeed, seem to be approaching the point at which it may jeopardize public safety. On Tuesday, Fox News Channel broadcast a harrowing interaction between air traffic controllers at Philadelphia’s Terminal Radar Approach Control and one incoming flight into Newark at the point when its communications systems crashed.
“Approach, are you there?” the pilot asked. There was no response. The United Airlines flight made five attempts to raise the tower over the course of 30 agonizing seconds before communications were reestablished. “We don’t have radar, so I don’t know where you are,” the controller informed one oncoming passenger jet. According to CNN’s sources, “connectivity between Federal Aviation Administration radar and the frequencies that air traffic controllers use to manage planes at the airport ‘completely failed.’”
The outage has been attributed to a faulty copper wire that failed, leaving air traffic controllers deaf, dumb, and blind. The New York Post, citing the National Air Traffic Controllers Association union, reported that the incident led some controllers to take “trauma leave” — contributing to a nationwide shortage of air traffic controllers that has been acutely felt at Newark, in particular. “United Airlines previously said 20% of FAA workers ‘walked off the job’ following the equipment malfunction,” the Post reported.
It was surely the most dangerous situation at Newark since last November, when a FedEx cargo plane lost main and backup communications, blew right past Newark, and sailed through the flight paths of incoming and outgoing traffic into New York City’s LaGuardia Airport.
The flight controllers’ abdication of their duties may be grating, but their exasperation is understandable. “The system that we’re using is not effective to control the traffic that we have in the airspace today,” said Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy in an interview with Fox host Laura Ingraham. “We have really old infrastructure in America,” he added, citing those frail copper wires and even the system’s reliance on antiquated floppy disks. “This should have been dealt with in the last administration,” Duffy complained. “They did nothing.”
It’s hard to begrudge Duffy’s vexation with his predecessors — in particular, the gadfly who occupied his role over the last four years, whose record as transportation secretary will haunt him when he invariably seeks elected office again. But the buck stops at Duffy’s desk now. He and his boss will take the blame if the exigency in America’s airports becomes a catastrophe.
And Newark isn’t the only airport in trouble. In 2023, a malfunction in the system that distributes safety-critical messages to pilots resulted in the first nationwide ground stop for all air traffic since the September 11 attacks. This January, 67 people were killed over the skies of Washington D.C. when “multiple layers of safety precautions failed,” resulting in a midair collision between a passenger jet and a Blackhawk helicopter. “Tensions have remained high at Reagan National’s control tower” since the incident, the Wall Street Journalreported this week. “In late March, a controller running the Reagan tower punched another controller after he refused to monitor helicopter traffic, according to people briefed on the exchange.”
Airports across the country have experienced “moderate” delays as a matter of course for weeks, in part as a response to staffing shortages as well as systems failures. “The FAA has some 10,700 fully certified controllers, leaving it about 3,000 short of its target,” the Journal’s reporting continued. “Controllers have complained of fatigue from often having to work 10-hour days, six days a week as a result.” Duffy has resorted to offering lucrative bonuses to potential new candidates and imminent retirees in the effort to stanch the bleeding, but that is a long-term solution to what is already an acute problem.
Duffy appears to understand the scope of the problem facing not just Newark’s airport but all of America’s air transit network. “We’re going to build a brand-new air traffic control system — from new telecom, to new radars, to new infrastructure,” he told Ingraham. We’re bringing on new air traffic controllers,” he continued. “We are going to radically transform the way air traffic control looks.”
Unfortunately, help is not on the way in anything that would resemble a timely manner. “The FAA acknowledges the shortcomings and plans improvements,” the American Journal of Transportation reported in 2023, “but acting Administrator Billy Nolen notified House lawmakers Jan. 27 that fixes wouldn’t be fully completed until 2030. Congress first ordered the agency to begin upgrading the Notam system in 2012.”
Where’s the Department of Government Efficiency when you need it?
Unfortunately for Duffy, he has found himself holding the bag. The crisis that Congress tasked the FAA with forestalling over a decade ago won’t wait until the end of this decade before it erupts. Our luck already ran out in the skies over Reagan International Airport in January. More colossal disasters are yet to come unless speedy and decisive action is taken soon.
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