Planes were briefly “flying blind” into Newark Liberty International Airport last week after a communications blackout occurred, multiple reports revealed Monday.
Sources told Bloomberg the outage lasted 90 seconds on April 28 and shook up the on-duty controllers so much that some were placed on “trauma leave.” A source told the New York Post that the blackout was caused by a “fried piece of copper wire.”
Galen Munroe, a National Air Traffic Controllers Association spokesman, told The New York Times that controllers “temporarily lost radar and communications with the aircraft under their control” and were “unable to see, hear, or talk to them.”
Air Traffic Control staffing has been stretched thin nationwide, including at Newark. On top of that, the Post reported the team handling Newark’s airspace lost about 20 percent of its controllers to trauma leave last week.
Such an abrupt staff reduction has been blamed for the airport’s operational woes ever since, including hundreds of cancellations, days-long delays, diversions, and its largest carrier, United Airlines, announcing it was halting 35 daily routes indefinitely.
Munroe told the Times that the scary minute-and-a-half qualified workers to be put on leave under the Federal Employees Compensation Act, which allows federal workers who are injured or experience a traumatic event on the job to leave work. There were no accidents at Newark during the blackout, but there was a two-hour ground stop put in place that day for the airport.
The workers on leave are based at Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach Control. A source told CNN that connectivity between Federal Aviation Administration radar and the frequencies controllers use to manage planes during landing and takeoff had “completely failed.”
CNN’s source said those on leave will be on paid leave for 45 days.
Newark’s air traffic control being handled in Philadelphia is relatively new, CNN reported. Having recently moved operations from Long Island, the new facility “had to jerry-rig the connections” to get them working.
Newark is the 12th largest airport by passenger volume, and its week from hell has thrown a wrench in the plans of tens of thousands of passengers. The airport had already cancelled 151 flights on Monday by 4 p.m., and another 306 were delayed, many of them United flights. The FAA told travelers Monday that they should expect nearly four-hour delays for all inbound flights.
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said the workers put on leave “walked off the job” in a statement on Friday. This peeved some in the aviation world.
“The controllers did not ‘walk off the job’ as it has been reported by the media,” the controller’s union said Monday. “Due to the event, the controllers took absence under the Federal Employees Compensation Act. This program covers all federal employees that are physically injured or experience a traumatic event on the job.”
CNN’s aviation source shared that sentiment.
“The controllers didn’t just walk off the job—they were traumatized; their equipment failed,” the source said. “It’s written in the regulations, if they experience a traumatic event, they can take time off to go see a psychiatrist … The people working that day did that.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has not spoken about the communications snafu between Philadelphia and planes at Newark. He said in a press conference last week that he will ask Congress to shell out billions to reform U.S. air traffic control infrastructure.
Duffy, 53, has been feeling the heat on the Newark situation. He was the subject of mass outrage over the weekend after he shared a photo of himself smiling with a plate of tacos while hordes of travelers were stranded in New Jersey and elsewhere.
Sen. Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from neighboring New York, said Monday that he requested that the Office of the Inspector General investigate the problems in Newark. He cited firings at the Federal Aviation Administration, which reportedly numbered in the “several hundreds” at the request of the Department of Government Efficiency, as also to blame.
“To say that there is just minor turbulence at Newark Airport and the FAA—that would be the understatement of the year,” he said. “We’re here because the FAA is really a mess.”
Schumer also said he was baffled that such a chilling communications blackout could be caused by copper wire—something Duffy pointed out as a serious issue in March.
“The technology is old and must be updated,” Schumer said. “One of the things that happened at Newark is a copper wire burnt. Why are we using copper wire in 2025? Have they heard of fiber?”
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