Newark plane traffic briefly slowed again due to telecoms issue, FAA says

The Federal Aviation Administration was forced to briefly slow arriving and departing planes at New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport on Sunday because of a new telecommunications issue, the agency said.

The Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach Control suffered a new problem that briefly led the FAA to issue a ground stop while it ensured redundancies were working as designed.

The FAA said operations have returned to normal. On Friday, the Philadelphia facility suffered a 90-second radar and telecommunications outage, the second in two weeks after a serious outage on April 28.

The latest incidents highlight the air traffic control network’s ageing infrastructure. US transport chief Sean Duffy on Thursday proposed spending billions of dollars to fix the network over the next three to four years.

Duffy reiterated in an interview that was broadcast on Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press that flights need to be scaled back.

“We’re having these glitches in the system. So we slow it down and keep people safe. That’s what we do,” Duffy said, pledging quick upgrades to Newark. “We’re going to start to see Newark be far more resilient in the near term.”

The FAA last year relocated control of the Newark airspace to Philadelphia to address staffing and congested New York City-area traffic.