The chaos that has plagued Newark Liberty International Airport for more than a week showed no sign of ending Wednesday—even as the Federal Aviation Administration released a plan to overhaul the airport’s air traffic control system.
The nation’s 12th-busiest airport had 84 cancellations and 26 delays before noon, according to the flight-tracking site FlightAware.
Earlier in the day, the FAA said in a statement that Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is taking action “immediately” to address the tech issues and lack of staffing that have triggered hundreds of flight disruptions over the last week.
Many of the changes affect the system that processes radar data for the Newark controllers. Last week, that system failed. For more than 90 seconds, the planes were flying completely blind. The incident was so jarring that several controllers involved had to take “trauma leave.”
Duffy and the FAA are aiming to avoid another catastrophe by adding three new communications connections, installing a backup system, and replacing copper wire with fiberoptic cables. The outage last week was reportedly caused by a “fried piece of copper wire,” according to the New York Post.
The FAA said it has also increased Newark’s inadequate air traffic control staffing, which has reportedly amplified the problems at the airport.
The agency said there are now 22 fully certified staffers. Twenty-one staffers are still in training, 10 of whom are receiving instruction “on-the-job,” the FAA said. Last Thursday, Duffy announced a new $5,000 bonus for those who make it through the air traffic control academy.
The situation at Newark airport has become a crisis for Duffy, who was a Fox Business host and formerly served as a Republican congressman before joining President Donald Trump’s Cabinet.
An air traffic controller told MSNBC last week that the airport is “is not a safe situation right now for the flying public.” They urged travelers to “avoid Newark at all costs.”
“You’re starting to see cracks in the system,” Duffy said at a news conference last Thursday. “It‘s our job to actually see over the horizon what the issues are and fix it before there is an incident that we will seriously regret.”
In response to the Newark chaos, United Airlines canceled 35 of its daily flights at the airport, with CEO Scott Kirby writing that the airline felt like “there is no other choice in order to protect our customers.”
Alongside the chaos at Newark, Wednesday marked the deadline for air travelers to acquire a Real ID, which will now be required to pass through airport security. MyCentralJersey reported that as of Wednesday morning, the requirement hadn’t seemed to lengthen TSA lines at Newark.
Duffy’s tenure as transportation secretary has been marked by a string of aviation disasters and near-misses, including a mid-air crash over Washington, D.C., that killed 67 in late January.
A Newark air traffic controller in the room for the 90-second outage told CNN, “It was just by the grace of God that there wasn‘t another plane in its way. We all expected what happened in D.C. to happen here.”
In February, amid the Elon Musk-led push to reduce federal staffing, the FAA cut 400 workers, but Duffy said at the time that “zero air traffic controllers and critical safety personnel were let go.”
However, during a closed-door March Cabinet meeting, Duffy accused Musk’s team at the Department of Government Efficiency of trying to fire air traffic controllers, which the world’s richest man dismissed as a “lie,” The New York Times reported.
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