FAA extends flight limits at Newark airport into June because of controller shortage and tech issues

The flight restrictions that have been in place at New Jersey’s largest airport ever since air traffic controllers first lost their radar and radios briefly last month will remain in place into June, the Federal Aviation Administration announced Tuesday.

The interim rule will cap the number of arrivals and departures at Newark Liberty International Airport at 28 apiece per hour. That’s in line with the limits imposed after about half a dozen controllers went on a 45-day trauma leave following the first outage on April 28.

In mid-June, the limit might be bumped up after a runway construction project largely wraps up, and the controllers on leave would be scheduled to return. After that, the FAA has said it might be able to increase the limit to 34 arrivals and 34 departures an hour, which would bring it closer to the 38 or 39 flights that typically took off and landed hourly before the problems.

The FAA has taken a number of steps to address the technical problems with a software update and new fiber optic lines that seemed to have helped keep the radar online even during subsequent disruptions. But a longer-term fix of building a new radar system at the Philadelphia facility that directs planes in and out of the airport will likely take months, and even after that, the aging infrastructure may remain vulnerable.

“Our goal is to relieve the substantial inconvenience to the traveling public from excessive flight delays due to construction, staffing challenges, and recent equipment issues, which magnify as they spread through the National Airspace System,” acting FAA Administrator Chris Rocheleau said.

For now, the airlines that fly out of Newark will likely have to cut their schedules to match the limits. Once fewer flights are scheduled each day, there will likely be fewer cancellations, although operations at the airport have been much smoother this week with many fewer cancellations and delays.

Twice in the past month, the radar and communications systems that Philadelphia air traffic controllers who direct planes in and out of Newark rely on failed for a short time. That happened because the main line that carries the radar signal down from another FAA facility in New York failed, and the backup line didn’t work immediately.

The controllers were unable to see or communicate with the planes around Newark Airport for as long as 90 seconds on April 28 and May 9.

The lines — some of which were old copper wires — failed a third time May 11, but the backup system worked and the radar stayed online. The FAA said a fourth outage Monday knocked out radio communications for two seconds, but the radar stayed online.

After the initial outage, the already shorthanded control center in Philadelphia lost five to seven controllers to trauma leave. That left the airport unable to handle all the scheduled flights, leading to hundreds of cancellations and delays.

The FAA quickly limited the number of flights in Newark to between 24 and 28 arrivals and the same number of departures every hour to ensure the remaining controllers could handle them safely. At times when controller staffing has been especially lean because of sick leave, the FAA has limited traffic even further.

Officials have said the problems affecting the Newark airport are a prime example of why the entire air traffic control system nationwide needs to be overhauled.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced a multibillion-dollar plan to upgrade the nation’s aging air traffic control system earlier this month. The House tentatively included $12.5 billion in the overarching bill that Republicans are trying to pass now, but officials have called that amount just a down payment on the overall plan.