Air traffic controllers are grappling with nearly 1,000 technical malfunctions each week — a crisis expected to worsen unless the federal government invests in a complete overhaul of the outdated systems in place, according to a former FAA executive and multiple airline industry sources who spoke to The NY Post.
This alarming revelation follows a communications and radar failure that lasted for 90 seconds at Newark Liberty International Airport, leading to widespread flight delays and cancellations that extended well beyond the initial incident.
The April 28 disruption was traced back to a burnt copper wire. In the aftermath, five employees from the FAA’s control center in Philadelphia reportedly took up to 45 days of “trauma leave,” as reported by CNN.
“This is a copper wire system, and frankly the FAA is experiencing almost 1,000 outages a week,” said one airline official. “Some outages are worse than others — but the bad thing about them is you can’t predict them.”
Experts point out that the enormous network of copper wires spanning from coast to coast is under extreme stress from the tens of thousands of flights handled daily — a strain made worse by the shrinking number of certified professional controllers (CPCs) in the workforce.
Officials described the situation as one of mounting urgency, with technology that dates back to the late 1980s and early 1990s still in use. One insider called the issue a “top priority” that lawmakers must tackle in upcoming federal budget negotiations.
David Grizzle, who held senior leadership roles at the FAA during President Barack Obama’s administration, said the crumbling system stems from outdated infrastructure, insufficient staffing, and unreliable funding from Congress.
“Historically, we have assured safety by trading off inefficiency, and so we would just slow the traffic down more and more and more to keep it safe,” Grizzle said.
“But when you start having unscheduled outages like what happened at Newark — you can’t do the safety-for-efficiency tradeoff like we’ve been doing.”
“Today at Newark the average flight is four hours delayed,” he added. “The FAA is holding planes on the ground all over the country in order to meter the number of arrivals down to a small enough number to safely manage it with the staffing and the unreliable equipment that they have.”
As of last October, the FAA employed 1,020 fewer certified controllers than it did in 2012 — a 9% drop. Only 34 new controllers were brought on board during the previous year.
Overall, 10,791 certified professionals are monitoring the nation’s skies across 300 FAA facilities, directing as many as 50,000 flights per day.
Grizzle, asked about the Newark disruption, called it the most “dramatic” failure in recent memory but warned that events like it will likely become more frequent.
“The nature of an unscheduled outage is you don’t know where it’s going to happen,” he said, adding that even a 90-second lapse is dangerous — “if a plane is traveling at 555 miles per hour, a few seconds is significant.”
Despite the risks, Grizzle stressed that U.S. air travel remains safe thanks to existing safety protocols.
“They can still assume that this is a very safe system, but the margin of safety is declining and the level of delays and cancellations that are being required to maintain this level of safety is completely unacceptable for a modern country like the United States,” he said.
“We’re having to cancel hundreds of flights because we simply don’t have the technology and staffing to manage them.”
Sources say Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is expected to roll out a sweeping reform plan this Thursday. The initiative will reportedly include aggressive recruitment, new advanced technology, and a consolidation of about two dozen air traffic control towers into a handful of high-tech hubs.
In a Monday appearance on Fox News, Duffy sharply criticized the Biden administration for failing to fix the FAA’s outdated telecom systems.
“It hasn’t been updated in the last 30 to 40 years,” he said, recounting what led to the Newark failure.
“The primary communication line went down, the backup line didn’t fire, and so for 30 seconds, we lost contact with air traffic control,” Duffy said on “The Ingraham Angle.”
“Were planes going to crash? No, they have communication devices. They can see other air traffic,” he explained. “But it’s a sign that we have a frail system in place, and it has to be fixed.”
Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.), who chairs the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, is aiming to allocate at least $4.75 billion toward upgrades to the FAA’s communications infrastructure in the next federal budget.
On Wednesday, the FAA said it would add “three new, high-bandwidth telecommunications connections” between radar facilities in New York and Philadelphia.
The agency also announced plans to recruit more air traffic controllers, swap out old copper wiring for modern fiber optics, and install a backup radar system in Philadelphia as an added safeguard.
At Philadelphia TRACON, the radar control center in question, only 22 certified controllers are currently active, supported by 21 other controllers and supervisors still undergoing training.
“We have a healthy pipeline with training classes filled through July 2026,” an FAA spokesperson said.
“The FAA has been slowing arrivals and departures at Newark Liberty International Airport due to runway construction at Newark and staffing and technology issues at Philadelphia TRACON, which guides aircraft in and out of the airport,” the spokesperson added.
Nicholas Calio, who leads the top U.S. airline trade group, warned Congress in March that almost 90% of the FAA’s infrastructure budget is being used just to patch problems in the existing network.
“It’s not acceptable to just continue to tolerate a chronically understaffed air traffic control system. Just like it’s not acceptable for controllers and technicians to be using paper strips and floppy disks to run our nation’s National Aviation System.”
Sources say lawmakers are considering a much larger supplemental funding proposal — possibly in the range of $30 billion to $40 billion — in the coming months.
A December report from the Government Accountability Office found that 27% of the FAA’s 138 mission-critical systems were already “unsustainable,” while another 39% were labeled “potentially unsustainable.”
Industry insiders are also raising alarms over the use of “slot relief,” a policy that reduces flight volume at key airports like JFK and LaGuardia by roughly 10%. This approach has led to fewer flights and triggered criticism in a letter sent in April by Airlines for America, the group led by Calio.
The letter called on the FAA to extend slot relief until 2027 so that more staff can be hired and necessary upgrades can be completed before increasing flight capacity.
It further highlighted that “approximately 75% of all delays in the National Airspace System” occur in New York’s airspace.
“In 2019, the FAA estimated that the annual cost of delays to the U.S. economy and passengers was $33 billion, reinforcing the need to address these issues,” the letter said.
{Matzav.com}