Scott Kirby, the chief executive of United Airlines, was triumphant when he took the stage in front of an imposing Airbus jet at Newark Liberty International Airport on Tuesday.
After air traffic control equipment and staffing problems disrupted flights and rattled travelers this spring, United, the dominant airline at the airport, was enjoying a rebound. Mr. Kirby attributed this to hard work by his employees and improvements made by the Federal Aviation Administration, which manages air traffic control.
“Together, with all of you and the F.A.A. doing that, is what led to the most reliable summer in our history,” Mr. Kirby said about Newark Tuesday to hundreds of people, including many United employees.
But some air traffic controllers who manage flights at Newark are worried that the improvements are not sustainable. The New York Times spoke to five people with knowledge of the air traffic control center that oversees flights at the airport who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals.
Recent staffing for controllers at Newark has been down compared with last spring. New managers appointed after the technology glitches that peaked in April and May have been trying to deny requests from controllers and their supervisors for time off, an effort to apparently boost attendance but has been hurting already-sagging morale.
And despite upgrades made by the F.A.A., some of the same equipment issues that hampered controllers in the spring have remained. As a result, controllers overseeing Newark’s traffic, most of whom work out of an office in Philadelphia, have at times found it hard to communicate with pilots in the air.
F.A.A. officials suggested in a statement that the Biden administration had allowed equipment problems at Newark to fester and credited President Trump’s transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, for making fixes. “Unlike the previous administration, which experienced a significant number of outages at Newark,” officials stated, “Secretary Duffy prioritized addressing the problems and resolved them in record time.”
The agency added that it is “currently staffed” with 21 certified controllers, one of whom is out on medical leave. Twenty-nine more people are in training, the F.A.A. said, and some of them will complete their training this month.
Aviation experts said that more work remained and that it was too early to say whether the F.A.A. had done enough to put the airport’s air traffic control operation on a path to sustainable progress.
“It’s probably another summer before you really get a sense of whether it’s truly fixed or whether it’s still getting there,” said Bob Mann, an industry consultant and former airline executive.
For now, United and the F.A.A. can claim at least a short-term victory.
In May, more than 6 percent of flights departing from Newark were canceled, far more than the two other major airports in the New York area, according to Cirium, an aviation data firm. But in August, only about 1 percent of flights were canceled. More flights from Newark were delayed last month than at the two other New York airports, according to Cirium. But United said that its flights out of Newark arrived at their destinations on time more often than flights operated by many other airlines in the region.
The airport is an important center for United, accounting for about one in four of the airline’s international flights. The airline said this week that more than six million people had on-time flights at Newark this summer, the most in the airline’s history. Mr. Kirby also noted with a slight laugh on Tuesday that Newark had just had an eight-day stretch with no F.A.A. orders pausing flights to Newark from taking off from their origin airports. “That’s really unusual,” he said.
United credited the turnaround this summer to several factors, including the airport wrapping up intensive runway construction weeks ahead of schedule and the F.A.A. limiting hourly flights to and from the airport into next year.
Mr. Kirby acknowledged that the F.A.A. had more work to do, including investing in technology and training more air traffic controllers.
The technology failures that made last spring miserable, including a simultaneous loss of radar feeds and radio connections for some controllers on a single day in April, have to a large extent been ameliorated, said three of the people familiar with the conditions at the airport. A new fiber-optic communications line was activated in July. Satellite connections were brought in as emergency backups to malfunctioning radios. Radar imagery has been much more reliable, the people said, and radio glitches are shorter.
But F.A.A. records and interviews with the people knowledgeable about the air traffic office overseeing Newark suggest that some old problems have been on the rise since late August.
On Aug. 27 and 28, for example, controller radio connections to pilots became unreliable, those people said, requiring officials to temporarily reduce the number of planes that could take off or land. That, in turn, caused delays for many hours, according to F.A.A. alerts and local news reporting. The F.A.A. said that some controllers had reported “static and other minor frequency issues” and that the agency was still investigating those reports.
On Sept. 2, a controller in Philadelphia lost his radio connection with the pilots he was guiding for about 45 seconds. Two days later, a wave of radio problems involving staticky and crackling connections affected New York area airports from Long Island to Philadelphia.
At the same time, adverse weather and low staffing led to a ground stop at Newark and arrival delays throughout the New York region, according to the F.A.A. The disruptions were unrelated to equipment, the agency said.
The continuing technology issues are complicating the jobs of an already taxed controller staff in Philadelphia. The certified controllers available to work in that office are working long shifts and, often, overtime.
In recent weeks, two experienced controllers retired. A third controller was not working because of an issue with medical certification. And a fourth controller — the person who lost his radio connection for 45 seconds on Sept. 2 — took time off to recover from that experience.
Three trainees are set to be certified soon. But because of the recent retirements and other absences, staffing in Philadelphia has already fallen below its levels in early June, when the F.A.A. said it was at 24.
The staffing shortage could get worse next summer, these people said, because at that time more than a dozen controllers — who had temporarily relocated to Philadelphia after the F.A.A. established the Newark hub there in 2024 — become eligible to return to their home base in New York.
For United, these challenges have financial consequences. Fallout from the spring’s disruptions — which included passengers’ avoiding the airport — erased about 1.2 percentage points from the airline’s profit margin during the spring financial quarter. The airline has said that it expects to lose another one percentage point in the quarter that runs through September.
But United is optimistic. Its planes are crowded again and, on Tuesday, it said it planned to hire about 2,500 employees to support its operations at Newark.
Kate Kelly covers money, policy and influence for The Times.
Niraj Chokshi is a Times reporter who writes about aviation, rail and other transportation industries.
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