'Like old phone systems': Newark Airport chaos is decades in the making, experts say

The chronic delays and frightening service outages that have plagued Newark Liberty International Airport over the last month can be directly traced to decades of deferred maintenance to the region’s archaic air traffic control systems, according to federal records and aviation experts.

The roughly 3,000 passenger and cargo flights in and out of Newark every day are routed through a patchwork of aging technology that includes computers that rely on floppy disks and hundreds of miles of outdated copper wires that transmit crucial flight path data.

Federal aviation officials and watchdogs have for years said the entire country’s 1970s-era flight control infrastructure is in dire need of an upgrade. But the problems with the equipment have come to a head in recent months at Newark, where they’re compounded by a shortage of air traffic controllers and an ongoing runway reconstruction that’s caused a bottleneck at the airport.

Problems with that aging equipment caused the radar and communications systems at the Federal Aviation Administration’s Philadelphia control center — where Newark’s airspace is managed — to go offline for an estimated 90 seconds at least twice over the last month, according to federal reports. The outages traumatized air traffic controllers: The union representing the workers said many employees at the facility went on leave after each incident, worsening a staffing shortage among air traffic controllers for Newark’s airspace that’s lingered for years.

“If you lose one or both of your critical primary tools to perform your job, and you know that those aircraft are flying at speeds up to 250 miles an hour converging on each other, that is stressful,” said Michael McCormick, a retired air traffic control supervisor who worked for the FAA for 33 years.

The air traffic controller shortage led to a ground stop at the airport last Sunday, and thousands of delays that have averaged more than two hours have persisted since the first outage last month.

On Wednesday, FAA officials met with airline leaders to plan a reduction in flights at Newark while the FAA scrambles to upgrade old copper wires and computer technology while also addressing the staffing problems. The airport is normally allowed to schedule up to 77 flights per hour — but the FAA proposed reducing that to no more than 56 until June 15, and then to 68 until Oct. 25.

“The airport clearly is unable to handle the current level of scheduled operations,” FAA Chief Counsel William McKenna wrote in a notice this week.

Some airlines like United have already released plans to reduce their flights at Newark. During a congressional hearing on Wednesday, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said he would release a plan to reduce flights on all airlines at the airport in the coming weeks, but said the changes would not lead anyone’s already-booked flights to be canceled.

To fix Newark, feds have their eye on Philly

The airspace around Newark used to be managed at the FAA’s terminal radar approach control — or TRACON — facility in Westbury, Long Island, where flight traffic at LaGuardia and Kennedy airports is also managed. The facility has also faced staffing problems for decades, according to McCormick.

To help the staffing problems at Westbury, the FAA in 2024 decided to instead manage all of Newark’s flights from its Philadelphia TRACON.

But the people controlling Newark’s flights in Philadelphia still rely on technology and data that’s ported over from Long Island through an interstate system of old copper communications cables, which federal officials have said must be replaced with modern fiber optic cables.

“It’s kind of like our old phone systems in the house, the landline-based systems, copper wire-based systems. A lot of the [air traffic control] telecommunication is still based upon copper-based communication lines,” said aviation law expert Jason Matzus. “We’ve long ago transitioned in our homes from that type of communication line infrastructure to fiber optics, and that’s what the FAA needs to do.”

McCormick said that technology is what caused the radar and communication systems for Newark flights to go offline.

“That’s what is failing, that relay communication mechanism,” McCormick said.

The U.S. transportation department released a report last week that detailed the extent of the old technology that air traffic control systems rely on across the country. The report also proposed a three-year timeline to invest billions of dollars into nationwide upgrades. The funding would be included in President Donald Trump’s federal budget draft, which would have to be approved by Congress first.

But Matzus said the national air traffic control system should not have reached its current state of decay.

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” Matzus said. “It would’ve been much cheaper and much easier to manage these infrastructure issues if annual or other types of periodic investment were made over the years.”

Meanwhile, Duffy said the FAA’s plans to reduce service at Newark would allow for short-term equipment upgrades.

The staffing issues will take longer to fix. FAA records indicate moving Newark’s air traffic control operations to Philadelphia didn’t solve the staffing shortage. An FAA notice said the agency only has 68% of the staff it needs at the TRACON to manage Newark’s airspace.

During his congressional testimony on Wednesday, Duffy said his team is working to train more air traffic controllers to manage flights in and out of Newark — but said that won’t happen overnight.

“It takes a year, even for an experienced controller, to get trained up in the Newark airspace,” he said. “You can't just move them around.”