Newark Airport flights are reduced through 2025 to smooth out delays, FAA says

Federal officials said they are capping flights into and out of Newark Liberty International Airport through the end of the year to reduce potential delays from congestion after extensive disruptions this spring.

Starting June 16 and lasting through Oct. 25, arrivals and departures will generally be limited to 34 each per hour, according to an order the Federal Aviation Administration issued Friday. And on weekends from Sept. 1 through Dec. 31, they will be capped at 28 each per hour to accommodate construction on an airport runway.

While partial work on the runway concluded ahead of schedule last week, officials said weekend work would resume after the summer travel season, from Fridays at 11 p.m. through Sundays at 5 a.m.

The finalized limits follow a hellish month of delays and cancellations for travelers through Newark. Thousands of flights were disrupted due to chronic staffing shortages at the airport’s air traffic control center in Philadelphia as well as critical technology outages and the runway closure, which lasted nearly two months. Federal officials initially implemented the flight caps last month to address congestion at Newark.

“The FAA is looking to try to get ahead of the kind of chaos we saw when the runway was fully closed 24/7,” aviation analyst Jason Rabinowitz said Sunday.  “This was always the plan, except the FAA’s mitigation plan going into this was quite insufficient, unfortunately, so now they’ve kind of had to go back after the fact and retool things a bit.”

The weekend limits starting in September will likely affect end-of-year holiday travel, including for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Newark is one of the busiest airports in the country and welcomed almost 49 million travelers last year, when holiday travel set new records at airports across the region, according to the Port Authority.

The FAA and its parent agency, the U.S. Department of Transportation, have said they are working to upgrade decades-old air traffic tech to avoid further turmoil at Newark and other airports.

On three instances from April to May, an outage at the Philadelphia air traffic center briefly left controllers blind to planes flying into and out of Newark, leading federal officials to issue at least one ground stop. Six controllers at the short-staffed center went on trauma leave after one of the outages, according to their union.

About 90 miles of older cables between Philadelphia and Long Island that relay communications and radar data to Newark have been replaced with fiber-optic cables, an FAA spokesperson previously told Gothamist. The new cables are set to go live as soon as the end of June, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said last week.