Earlier this year, air traffic controllers working a graveyard shift for Newark Liberty International Airport noticed a strange phenomenon. Phantom aircraft were populating one of their radar screens.
“False targets” kept showing up in one airspace map “throughout the night,” one employee recounted in an incident report.
Controllers for Newark have also experienced a spate of unnerving equipment outages this year. In one instance, the radio feed connecting pilots with the controllers was marred with static. When controllers tried to use a backup line, they found that it wasn’t working at all.
On another occasion, automatic alerts attached to a weather-detection system that flagged gusty and sometimes dangerous conditions known as “wind shear” were not working.
These incidents, which have not been previously reported and were discovered in a review of government documents by The New York Times, occurred over the months before and weeks after a massive outage took down both radar scopes and radio contact with pilots simultaneously on April 28 — scaring controllers, causing delays, canceling flights and frustrating the flying public.
The records reviewed by The Times reveal previously unknown glitches this year that point to a more profound problem with air-traffic control technology in the Philadelphia tower that handles much of the traffic for Newark than even the outage in April and others in May have suggested.
Those hiccups are “totally abnormal,” said Al Castillo, a longtime controller who as a government contractor helped the F.A.A. study traffic flow scenarios in Newark.
“I worked in a radar room similar to New York, but in the D.C. area, for 10 to 11 years,” Mr. Castillo said. “We never had the radar go blank.”
The nation’s aging air-traffic control system received little attention for years. But after the April outage at Newark, its dysfunction burst into public view. The events of April 28, which included a 30-second loss of radio and a 90-second loss of radar, were quickly followed by at least three more outages over a three-week period.
Roughly a half-dozen controllers who were shaken up by their experiences on April 28 immediately took time off to regroup, temporarily diminishing a controller staff that was already well below its desired level. As few as one or two controllers are now handling portions of eight-hour shifts that were designed to be worked by 10 or more, according to veteran controllers.
Equipment can always be fixed, but seasoned controllers are tough to replace, said S. Todd Yeary, a longtime Chicago controller who is now a lawyer and a pastor. “If we don’t have enough people to cover, then we have another layer of stress, in what I call real time, that you may not recover from,” he said.
Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, has urged repairs to the national air-traffic system, and a budget recently passed by the House of Representatives includes $12.5 billion toward that end. (It has not yet been approved by the Senate.)
“The F.A.A. has been transparent with the public about the issues affecting Newark,” the agency said in a statement. It added that it “is taking aggressive action to improve Newark operations,” including adding three new telecommunications connections and more fiber-optic wiring. It added that the facility also has 22 controllers and supervisors currently in training.
During an internal presentation on June 4, F.A.A. officials expressed optimism that they were getting a handle on the faulty wiring and other problems that have plagued the Newark controllers in Philadelphia, according to someone who was briefed on the meeting and was not authorized to speak publicly. New backup systems seem to be keeping the facility in better working order in recent weeks, the person said.
If the Newark team’s equipment is indeed on the road to improvement, it will be a significant turning point in a yearslong saga of fear and frustration — an atmosphere some controllers sarcastically describe as “plug and pray,” a reference to their state of mind when they plug in their radio headsets at the beginning of a shift.
In the early 2000s, the F.A.A. began planning to relocate dozens of Newark controllers to Philadelphia from Long Island, N.Y. Recruiting and certifying new controllers to work there had long been challenging, and agency leaders believed that the lower cost of living in Philadelphia might help them replenish the team. But many of the controllers on Long Island were reluctant to make the move. And the hopes of increasing their ranks have so far not come to fruition.
Even as the F.A.A. was negotiating the transfer with controllers and their union, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the agency was laying the physical communications lines that would deliver data from Newark to Philadelphia. During that same period, the reliability of controllers’ radios was declining noticeably, according to three controllers with knowledge of the airspace and email correspondence reviewed by The Times who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
“I think it’s important you’re made aware of how unreliable almost every EWR frequency has become,” wrote one air-traffic control manager to a supervisor in February 2023, using a shorthand for the Newark airport. He concluded: “Undoubtedly, this is an issue of safety as our ability to reliably communicate with aircraft is central to our job.”
The email was elevated to area managers, who expressed concern, according to the documents. But the flawed communications were never completely fixed, the controllers recalled.
Shortly after the group of Newark controllers relocated to Philadelphia last July, the problems worsened.
An incident in late August, in which a Newark controller there lost radar for 90 seconds, was followed by that controller’s resignation just days later. On Sept. 2, another equipment outage occurred, followed by yet another in November. Mr. Duffy has blamed the telecommunications lines that feed the Newark data to Philadelphia for the problems.
Several of the controllers with knowledge of the problems faced by Newark controllers say such episodes have been happening on and off for the past year. So frequent were the outages that unless they were particularly lengthy or alarming, they were quickly shrugged off, two of those people said.
The government records tell more of the story.
Between Jan. 1 and June 1 of this year, workers in the Philadelphia facility — handling both the Philadelphia and Newark airports — encountered more than 300 unscheduled equipment outages or malfunctions. Details of many of those are confidential, pending the results of internal reviews, and the Times was not able to review every one of the completed incident reports.
Some of the reports reflect the prosaic annoyances that can affect any work space. A broken light in a restroom. A busted break room refrigerator.
Other records describe more serious disruptions.
On Jan. 15, airport radar surveillance systems and a radar locator system went out.
On Jan. 23, a radio feed that pilots use in emergencies experienced static. Its standby line was inaudible.
On Feb. 7, “all radar displays” were showing multiple false targets, according to the documents.
On Feb. 22, the facility went into air-traffic control “alert” mode because of equipment outages. Radar feeds connected to a half-dozen airspaces, including Newark’s, John F. Kennedy International Airport’s, and at least two military air bases, were affected. A software system that reports weather conditions was “not working.” Other systems for tracking flights in real time were coded yellow, meaning they were experiencing problems. Equipment that provides controllers with runway visibility was coded red, for inoperable.
On April 12, a “tone event” occurred — typically a ringing tone that interrupts the flow of radio communications with pilots and can damage a person’s hearing.
On April 20, “false targets,” or phantom objects that might be mistaken for planes, “appeared on the ARD scope” — a radar screen that feeds data from an area northeast of Philadelphia to Newark controllers — “throughout the night.”
On May 1, three days after the massive April 28 outage, there were multiple problems. First, controllers had “trouble hearing pilots” on a key radio channel. “Controller then heard a popping sound through the headset,” they add. “A loud static was then heard over all the ETV speakers,” the documents state, referring to a communications touch panel that activates radios and landlines. “Attempt to switch frequencies on all ETVs on all positions did not work,” they add, and “switch to orange jacks did not work as well.” (Orange jacks are a dated, but usually reliable, type of socket into which controllers can plug in their headset wires as a backup measure.)
On May 20, controllers were unable to notify pilots of wind shear, which is the change of wind direction and wind speed with height, because their alert system was down. On a gusty day, a pilot facing wind shear will constantly have to adjust speed, pitch and yaw — the rotation of its vertical axis — to land or take off safely.
Kate Kelly covers money, policy and influence for The Times.
The post Equipment Problems Vexed Newark Airport Controllers for Years appeared first on New York Times.
