There are too many planes in the sky. In 2024, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) supervised nearly 16.8 million flights in American airspace — half a million more than the year prior. To manage all of those airplanes, however, the FAA uses an air traffic control system designed in the early 1990s — when features like trackballs and color monitors were new, and air traffic controllers handled less than half as many flights every year.
Like many government agencies, the FAA has faced chronic budget constraints and poor oversight in the ensuing two decades. Not only is its system functionally obsolete; it’s also badly understaffed. Too often, the agency must scramble to find the least-bad solution for its mounting problems — and not all of these solutions are good or even safe.
One such scenario has been unfolding at Newark Liberty International Airport for the last year. And it hasn’t just created delays and cancellations — it has put people’s safety at risk.
Newark airport became national news starting on Monday, April 28th. Around 1:27PM, pilots abruptly lost contact with the controllers that oversee the airport’s approach and departure airspace, known as Newark Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON).
“Can you hear us?” asked one United pilot. After a beat of silence, another pilot keyed the radio. “Hey Approach, are you there?” A third chimed in, his call sign more of a question. “Austrian eight-niner?”
Several more seconds passed before Newark TRACON came back on the air.
“United 1951, how do you hear me?”
“Loud and clear now,” the first pilot replied.
“Hey Approach, are you there?”
For the moment, normal operations resumed — though controllers were worried about the possibility of another outage. “Upjet 905, join the final approach course,” said one controller, then prudently added, “if you don’t hear me, you can continue on the approach.”
Seconds later, every radar screen at Newark approach went dark.
“Radar contact lost. We just lost our radar.”
Suddenly blind and unsure if they could even maintain comms with pilots, Newark’s controllers did what they were trained to do — get everyone to a safe holding place until the situation stabilized. To one United pilot in final descent: “stay on the arrival and maintain 6000.”
To a private pilot, also preparing to land: “climb and maintain 4500.” They diverted another private pilot off to a nearby small airport: “Continue on towards Caldwell, call Caldwell Tower 119.8.” And they told a fourth private pilot passing that it was now up to him to maintain visual separation from other aircraft: “we’re just gonna have to cut you loose.”
‘Disruption is significant’
Air traffic controllers prepare for such contingencies, according to Dr. Hassan Shahidi, the president and CEO of the nonprofit FlightSafety Foundation.
“Emergency traffic is prioritized,” he said. “Flights may be held on the ground. Nearby centers may take over some services.”
Even in the best-case scenarios, however, “disruption is significant.”
Controllers at Newark only lost radio and radar for about a minute and a half until backup systems kicked in. And no airplanes crashed or even had a near miss. But it took the rest of the afternoon just to get operations restarted. No one took off again until 5PM, more than three hours later. At least a dozen flights were canceled, and 30 others were diverted to nearby airports. Higher-than-normal delays persisted for more than a week after the outage as airlines dealt with planes and crews that were out of position.
Another outage occurred a week and a half later on May 9th. At 3:55AM, radar displays went out twice.
“Imma hand you off here, our scopes just went black again,” said one of the controllers as she passed one flight over to JFK and LaGuardia controllers, who still had radar. “If you care about this, contact your airline and try to get some pressure on them to fix this stuff.”
“Imma hand you off here, our scopes just went black again.”
She was right to be exasperated. This was the sixth time in only nine months that Newark TRACON had lost radio and/or radar. But only now, after two major aviation accidents in January and February, were people paying attention.
The strangest thing of all is that the FAA appears to have brought the problem on itself — thanks in part to endemic government issues such as underfunding and bureaucracy, but also to the agency’s track record of bad risk management when it comes to modern technology.
“The airspace around New York is the most complex in the world,” says Michael McCormick, a former air traffic controller and current professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida. Controllers in this sector manage more than 6,000 flights per day between the 30-plus airports, heliports, and seaplane bases in the area. And almost a quarter of that volume is handled by Newark TRACON.
Those controllers aren’t actually located at the airport. Beginning in 1978, the FAA centralized approach and departure traffic for every airport in the greater New York City area into the N90 “super facility” in Westbury, Long Island. N90 was and still is one of the largest TRACON control facilities in the country, with 200 controllers on staff. Their colocation, along with a direct feed into the FAA’s radar, satellite, and flight data system called STARS, makes operations more efficient and emergencies easier to handle. (For example, close coordination between N90 controllers helped guide the “Miracle on the Hudson” flight to a safe landing.)
But since the late ’70s, the job has gotten harder. In 1980, N90 handled an average of 2,200 flights per day. Last year, the number was 3,400. But pay has failed to keep pace both with the increasing complexity of the job, and the ever-growing cost of living in New York. In 1978, the median wage for an air traffic controller was around $33,000 a year. In the intervening decades, air traffic wages have increased fourfold, to $127,000 a year. But the cost of living in the area has increased even faster, by more than five times, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
It’s a vicious cycle. Low pay relative to cost of living means that N90 can’t keep people the way that facilities in Dallas or Denver can. And retention problems at N90 have led to mandatory overtime and six-day workweeks, further increasing burnout and losses. For the last five years, the FAA has attempted to solve N90’s “specific recruiting challenges.” But it failed.
By the summer of 2023, N90 could muster only two-thirds of its target of 300 controllers. The Newark sector was down to half strength. (Other facilities in lower-cost cities such as Dallas or Denver are closer to 80 percent). Delays were inevitable; in the middle of peak travel season, one out of every three flights out of Newark was delayed by an hour or more.
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By 2024, the FAA decided that more drastic action was needed. It gave up on N90 and decided to move Newark TRACON operations into the better-staffed Philadelphia facility. In a vacuum, it might have seemed like a decent tradeoff: disrupt the lives of a few controllers in order to reduce disruptions for thousands of flights and millions of passengers every year. But the FAA made an already marginal decision even worse.
First, the majority of Newark’s controllers refused to make the move at all. Eventually, the FAA authorized relocation bonuses of up to $100,000. Even then, only 17 of the original 33 controllers agreed to move from N90. Reassignments brought the total up to 24, still short of the pre-move totals — and far short of the 63-person target.
Second, the FAA failed to invest in the data infrastructure required to support remote operations. To save money, the FAA elected not to build a new STARS server in Philadelphia to support the move. A new server alone would require tens of millions of dollars, as well as installation of new internet and power infrastructure. Instead, it elected to send a “mirror feed” of telemetry from the STARS servers at N90, traveling over 130 miles of commercial copper telecom lines, with fiber optics to follow by 2030.
The annoyances of traditional cable internet — frequent lag, dropped sessions — are probably familiar to those who stream video or play games online. But for air traffic controllers, even the smallest service disruptions can become dangerous.
Especially when combined with the FAA’s already dire infrastructure. Every week, the air traffic control system in the United States suffers around 700 outages. Its systems are decades old, and are often held together with improvised fixes — daisy-chained power strips, cables protected only by aluminum foil, old radar systems being cooled by tabletop fans. And in February, at the direction of Elon Musk’s DOGE, the FAA laid off more than 100 workers, including the maintenance technicians and telecommunications specialists needed to keep unreliable systems in working order.
The FAA’s own analysis downplayed these risks, however. According to an internal study obtained by CNN, experts calculated that the risk of a critical failure for Newark’s remote feeds were one in 11 million, or a roughly “seven-nines” reliability standard that allowed only three seconds of downtime in a given year. It’s not clear how the agency calculated this figure. And FAA standards only require a “five-nines” standard, which allows up to five minutes of downtime in any given year. This math removed the last remaining impediment to the move.
As of this writing, the remote data feeds into Newark TRACON have been down for around 10 minutes over the course of 10 months — nearly two and a half times beyond the “five-nines” standard, and 200 times beyond the “seven-nines” estimate from its report.
It’s easy to state the obvious. The FAA should plan better. It should raise salaries and hire more people. It should replace old tech with new. (The agency did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Such glib solutioning ignores the agency’s intractable problems of time and money. It hired 1,500 new air traffic controllers last year and will hire 2,000 more this year, but many of them won’t be fully certified until 2026 at the earliest. It contracted with Verizon to build new fiber-optic links between FAA facilities, but many of these won’t come online for up to a decade. And its implementation of a “NextGen” air traffic control system to replace the current version may not be completed until 2034, even though the project was started in 2003.
It still isn’t enough to overcome decades of underinvestment
Although the agency’s budget has grown 50 percent over the last decade to $24 billion, it still isn’t enough to overcome decades of underinvestment. Last year, the FAA had to stretch a $1.7 billion maintenance budget to cover nearly $5.2 billion in outstanding repairs at air traffic control facilities. It had to spend nearly $532 million of its 2025 budget a year early to cover “uncontrollable employee compensation costs” such as mandatory overtime and the “surge” in hiring for new air traffic controllers.
Meanwhile, DOGE consultants have focused on finding money for new Starlink contracts and reducing oversight of SpaceX at the FAA. Cronyism, it turns out, has little impact on (or interest in) the government’s most difficult challenges.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has promised us “safe, state-of-the-art air travel,” but the FAA’s history (and the largely detail-free, eight-page “Brand New Air Traffic Control Plan”) suggest that it will be a long time coming. While we wait, we can at least console ourselves that air traffic controllers have learned how to give us safe air travel in the absence of state-of-the-art air travel.
Still, the entire system rests on a knife’s edge between safe operations and potential disaster. The smallest disruption can throw the entire system into chaos — putting thousands of lives, billions of dollars, and the reputation of American aviation as the safest in the world in harm’s way.
