Another Alarming Newark Airport Outage

The Federal Aviation Administration confirmed Monday yet another system outage occurred at the facility handling flights in and out of Newark Liberty International Airport.

The agency said the Philadelphia control tower handling the air traffic lost radio frequencies for about two seconds at around 11:35 a.m.

Despite the brief outages, all the aircraft “remained safely separated” at the New Jersey airport, officials added.

The outage remains under investigation.

Monday’s outage occurred at the troubled Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach Control (Tracon) area, which has continued to have intermittent outages since the first failure was reported on April 28.

The FAA said that new upgrades at the facility would prevent further outages following the last radar error on May 11.

Stiil, the brief failure caused the agency to implement new delays at the airport, which averaged about 23 minutes.

The series of outages have put the Newark airport in the national spotlight over issues with staffing shortages and its decades-old technology.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has said he’s working to update the facility after blaming the Biden administration for allegedly botching last year’s move of Newark’s air traffic control from New York to Philadelphia.

With the problems persisting at ERW, the FAA is proposing a large-scale reduction of traffic at the airport to just 28 arrivals per hour.

The reduced traffic would allow the airport to complete construction and updates on its runway, with daily work expected to last until June 15 and then continue onwards every Saturday til the end of the year.