On June 2nd, US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy traveled to Newark Liberty Worldwide Airport to have fun the reopening of runway 4L-22R. This was uncommon: few runway openings are glamorous sufficient to warrant a go to from the airport’s CEO, not to mention a cupboard secretary. However as we reported final month, few airports have come to represent USDOT’s mismanagement of the air site visitors management system as a lot as Newark.
The ceremony and press conference was meant to rework Newark into a special image — considered one of progress and motion. In his speech, Duffy positioned Newark’s issues as solvable, and the folks onstage — who included the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)’s Appearing Administrator Chris Rocheleau, United Airways CEO Scott Kirby, and a number of other different dignitaries — because the problem-solvers.
Collectively, they’d gotten union labor to rebuild a runway in 47 days as an alternative of 60; they’d satisfied Verizon to expedite a brand new fiber-optic cable; they’d recognized and stuck the “glitch within the system” that left Newark’s air site visitors controllers blind and unable to talk to pilots for a number of terrifying minutes.
Due to this whirlwind of exercise, Rocheleau anticipated that Newark would quickly be capable to improve its flight quantity by 25 p.c, or practically 12 extra flights per hour.
Or, as Kirby put it, “That is such a seminal turning level for not simply the close to time period however the long run of Newark.”
Inside two days, all three males have been confirmed fallacious. On the night of June 4th, a scarcity of air site visitors controllers pressured Newark to subject a ground stop, delaying greater than 100 flights for several hours. Another staffing-related delay occurred 4 days later. Optimism alone can’t remedy infrastructure issues which have been a long time within the making.
Particularly when they’re way more widespread than most individuals notice. Moreover the three days of disaster at Newark — on April twenty eighth, Could 1st, and Could ninth — there have been a minimum of a dozen cases the place gear or staffing issues considerably affected operations at air site visitors management facilities across the nation this 12 months.
Probably the most critical incidents occurred at air traffic control facilities in Kansas City in January, Oakland in February, and Denver in Could. Every time, controllers have been unable to see or talk with pilots after radar and radio failures. The Denver outage lasted for less than 90 seconds, however the others persevered for greater than an hour. Every one resulted in widespread delays and cancellations.
In March at Baltimore’s Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI), {an electrical} fireplace blamed on “overloaded getting old gear” halted operations for greater than two hours, resulting in 50 flight cancellations and greater than 150 delays.
And twice this year, the FAA’s Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system — a real-time database of each flying hazard and site visitors advisory that covers everything of American airspace — has gone down for a number of hours at a time, resulting in greater than 1,300 delays and cancellations.
It isn’t simply the expertise that’s inflicting issues. The FAA is brief greater than 3,000 air traffic controllers nationwide. This scarcity has pressured a number of air site visitors management services to subject “staffing triggers,” lowering the variety of flights of their airspace to accommodate decreased controller ranges. Staffing triggers have occurred air site visitors management services accountable for Austin twice, the regional airports round New York three times, and as soon as every at Chicago, Los Angeles, and Miami this 12 months.
Even this will not current the complete image of the depth and breadth of the air site visitors management system disaster. This record solely consists of incidents which have been reported by native information shops, or that may be retrieved within the FAA’s Air Traffic Control System Command Center (ATCSCC) advisory database — a system that purges most advisories after two weeks.
To place this in perspective, there have been 162 days in 2025 to date. On a minimum of 16 of these days — practically one in 10 — a serious portion of the air site visitors system has failed someplace in America.
A latest Government Accountability Office report from September 2024 discovered that 90 p.c of the nation’s vital air site visitors management infrastructure was due or late for a “expertise refresh.” Practically half of the 138 methods surveyed have been “thought-about unsustainable” or “probably unsustainable” attributable to shortfalls in funding, inadequate upkeep experience, or perhaps a lack of spare elements. (For instance, a 2023 FAA review discovered that the methods that observe airplanes within the air and on the bottom use greater than 700 beacons which might be greater than 20 years outdated, and whose producers not make spare elements.)
The FAA has been conscious of this drawback for many years. In 2003, the company started to scope a “Next Generation” air site visitors management system. This NextGen system would substitute the present infrastructure that had been “developed within the Forties and Fifties … and was not in a position to deal with will increase in air site visitors,” and could be delivered by 2025.
However the supply 12 months has arrived, and NextGen nonetheless exists mainly on paper. The company has but to attain even its minimal goal of launching each main NextGen system at a single main airport by 2025, not to mention the “full implementation” that it initially promised by the top of the 12 months. Some vital methods might not come on-line till 2030, together with the replacement for the air-to-ground communications system that has failed at Newark, Denver, and elsewhere.
Air site visitors controllers are nonetheless requested to keep up the identical ranges of security regardless of utilizing gear that’s a long time outdated. However they aren’t being supported, both. The vast majority of air site visitors management facilities are beneath goal staffing ranges. Greater than half don’t even meet a decrease “FAA normal” of 85 p.c of goal staffing ranges. To compensate, controllers are sometimes required to work six days a week, 10 hours a day. One air site visitors controller on Reddit referred to as this “the worst time to be an American ATC since 1981” — the 12 months that air site visitors controllers went on strike for higher wages, and President Ronald Reagan responded by firing greater than 11,000 of them.
On Could eighth, Secretary Duffy unveiled a “Brand New Air Traffic Control System Plan,” an eight-page “framework to reinvest within the Nationwide Airspace System.” Whereas the ambition is there, the small print are decidedly not. Issues this intractable would require a number of years of sustained funding, political assist, and correct administration and administration. This mix of things has not existed since a minimum of the early 2000s, if certainly it ever has.
So whereas Secretary Duffy is true to acknowledge the work that’s been performed to repair the issues at Newark and across the nation, there’s nonetheless an extended technique to go — and nobody silver bullet that may repair twenty years’ price of neglect.