On a recent afternoon in Philadelphia, air traffic controllers began screaming that they had lost radar feed due to planes coming and going to Newar Liberty International Airport.
Some of his colleagues still had radar, but their radio was dead, prompting a desperate call to their New York counterparts.
Then it was a tragic 30 seconds before the radio returned, and nothing more.
Shortly afterwards, a controller discovered the trainee. The trainees shook in the hallways, overseeing Newark traffic just a short time ago.
It was a chaotic scene on Monday, April 28th, according to several people who were present when controllers working in Newark's airspace lost the means to do their job.
The system's fault controller relies on some of the people who are working on the job that day, and has since required a few days of low staffing mental health rest. It also urged more than 1,000 flights to be cancelled or delayed at one of the country's busiest airports, with some passengers feeling annoyed and abandoned.
The fight against staffing is particularly noteworthy as the Federal Aviation Administration's decision to move part of Newark's air traffic control business to Philadelphia was headed for last summer.
The country's air traffic control system has been suffering from functional impairment for many years. Controller ranks have been exhausted due to retirement and training halts during the pandemic. Since then, adopting and certifying new controllers has been difficult. The New York Times says that existing controllers are becoming extremely stressful, tired and even sickened by long periods of time. Some people avoid seeking a doctor's appointment in doing so, as this could put the medical clearance needed to do their job at risk. Turnover rates occur frequently, especially amidst illness, family confusion, or fear of safety.
The suspension and later stages in Newark prompted public outrage.
Transport Secretary Sean Duffy, who oversees the FAA, is looking for a “brand-new air traffic control system.” Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, a minority leader, said the FAA was “really confused.” United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby, Newark's biggest user, blamed the controller “without work” by saying the airport “cannot handle the number of planes that are scheduled to operate there.”
However, current and previous controllers who demanded anonymity for fear of retaliation, and those who witnessed last week's suspension, said that time away from duties is appropriate under the circumstances given the difficulty of working under such obsessions. They also described the unsettling incident as the culmination of nine months of technical flaws that eroded the Newark team's confidence in the reliability of the tools essential to the work.
Last August, in an incident that partially denounced a third-party technician for accidentally cutting data feeds from a remote location, the controller lost its radar for about 90 seconds, according to people there. A week later, the radar scope was frozen several times, according to the FAA activity log reviewed by The Times. Then, about eight months later, the April 28 halt occurred when lawmakers criticized the “fried” copper wire.
“From what we can gather now, the communications line feeding the Newark sector in Philadelphia has failed,” said Dave Spero, president of a professional aviation safety expert, a union representing airway transport systems engineers, in an interview. He said the contractors, not the FAA itself, are responsible for those lines.
The FAA said it is working closely with facility managers and vendors to address communication issues, particularly across the national airspace system in the northeast. Duffy said the FAA “slowed the system down” to ensure travelers are safe in Newark.
The FAA admitted that some Newark controllers have taken the time to deal with the stress of recent outages. On Tuesday, the agency said it had slowed its arrival and departure in Newark due to a lack of staff. It added that it would be “take immediate steps to improve operational reliability” at airports, including installing new bandwidth data connections, deploying backup systems in Philadelphia, and increasing staffing between ranks of Newark Controllers.
Duffy will announce additional details on the planned air traffic control overhaul on Thursday. He has been working on this year since an air collision near Ronald Reagan National Airport, outside of Washington, killed 67 people.
In a statement, the FAA said there are 22 certified Newark controllers in Philadelphia, with roughly the same number of training available.
But that's not the big picture. With mental health leave and other personnel issues, according to people familiar with the situation, only 16 certified controllers can make calls every day, and they need more than twice that number to cover all shifts.
Aviation experts say the FAA has no quick fix for the lack of controllers.
Being a busy airspace controller like Newark usually requires years of nut and bolt training and experience in other busy airspaces close to major cities.
Even veteran controllers who joined the Newark team from hubs like Atlanta and San Diego will need up to a year of professional training to become familiar with Newark's nuances of traffic. This usually involves more than 80 departures and landings at a given time, according to a controller with knowledge of the space. In addition, Newark's controllers handle traffic at small regional airports, including those in Teterboro, New Jersey.
Controllers working in Newark airspace in Philadelphia were considered to be a solution rather than a problem. The FAA reasoned that the relatively low cost of living near Philadelphia attracts workers who want to buy a home or raise a family, and that the Philadelphia International Airport Control Tower, which is stationed, has been newly renovated.
This movement has been bothering us since its founding. Some controllers resisted leaving their perch in Westbury, New York. I worked there for years or decades with colleagues who handled flights in and out of Lagardia and Kennedy International Airports.
Some controllers who claimed the FAA would impose excessive hardship on their families were allowed to stay in Westbury. Others chose to seize the opportunity in Philadelphia and collected $100,000 incentive payments to do so. The workstation in the new building, which the FAA spent $36 million to modernize, was equipped with real-time tracking technology.
They reported on July 28th in a new post.
Newark's controllers first worked to reduce flight schedules to smooth out the kinks. But by mid-August, summer travel was robust, standard traffic levels had resumed both inside and outside Newark, and flights had progressed normally.
Then, on August 27, the Philadelphia Newark Controller lost its radar image about a minute and a half after the technician's mistake, according to two people at the control hub that day.
The controller was monitoring half a dozen planes the moment the radar disappeared, including two United Airline jets. According to three people with knowledge of the case, he had no visual image to guide him, so he tried to direct the pilot from memory.
According to the audio recording of the event, “All aircraft attention. Radar contact is lost. Radar contact is lost,” the controller said.
By the time the radar images returned, two people with knowledge of the incident said that one of the flights had well entered the airspace of Lagardia and flew down the Hudson River.
A controller with decades of experience, He retired within days of the incident, the three said they knew the issue.
The troubles in Philadelphia continued. Less than a week later, Newark inbound and outbound Newark faces delays and ground stops, i.e., takeoff and landing stops due to unrelated radar equipment issues.
These were the growth in the way the FAA handled the Newark Flight Data's relocation to Philadelphia when it moved Controllers, according to government and union officials at the time. Rather than feeding flight data directly generated in Newark to Philadelphia, the FAA instead routed the data to Westbury first and from there to Philadelphia, officials said.
This means that data needs to be moved further and it is also vulnerable to overloading by other hubs in the system experiencing glitches, said Spero, chairman of the Safety Experts Union.
“It caused what they called cascade disorders that involve freezing the target,” Sparo said. He mentioned the point representing mobile aircraft on radar screens that froze and urged alerts in several locations, according to FAA logs for the day.
The FAA said in a statement it has established a communications system that does not require facilities in Philadelphia to rely on feed from New York.
The controller said last fall that data and capacity hitch were not the main objections to the move, but it has long been a source of uncertainty. Those who witnessed recent events in Philadelphia only got worse as isolated glitches seem more trendy.
One controller there on April 28th reached his car before she shed tears, one of those people said. He took time, the person added, and it would need to be cleared by a mental health expert before he returns.
Mark Walker Reports of contributions.
