The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating a brief radio system outage at the Philadelphia air traffic control center responsible for handling flights at Newark Liberty International Airport.
The FAA said the control center lost radio frequencies for two seconds at around 11:35 a.m. local time Monday. Despite the outage, all aircraft “remained safely separated,” the FAA said in a statement to CBS News.
The brief outage is the fourth such incident to take place at Newark Airport since April 28 amid persistent equipment and staffing issues. After the April incident, a second outage on May 9 lasting 90 seconds resulted in 450 flights in and out of Newark being delayed. Another 141 flights were canceled, although heavy rain was also partially responsible for the delays and cancellations.
A third outage on May 11 also caused widespread delays.
The Philadelphia air traffic control facility that handles flights at Newark is also experiencing a staffing shortage.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said earlier this month that upgrades to the nation’s air traffic control system are underway. They include updating the system with new software and equipment in a revamp that will cost “tens of billions of dollars,” according to Duffy. The White House has already allocated $12.5 billion toward modernizing the system.
The existing system relies on decades-old technology, and the FAA has resorted to buying replacement parts on eBay or making them with 3D printers because new components are unavailable, Duffy told members of a Senate Appropriations subcommittee in April.
The problems have drawn attention to the severe shortage of air traffic controllers in the U.S. More than 90% of the nation’s airport towers are inadequately staffed and fall short of standards set by a working group that included the Federal Aviation Administration and the controllers’ union, according to a January analysis by CBS News of FAA data.
Megan Cerullo is a New York-based reporter for CBS MoneyWatch covering small business, workplace, health care, consumer spending and personal finance topics. She regularly appears on CBS News 24/7 to discuss her reporting.
The post Newark airport experiences another air traffic control outage appeared first on CBS News.
