Nearly 80 flights were cancelled, and over 60 were delayed at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey after air traffic control radar went down for the third time in just two weeks.
Five controllers have already taken trauma leave over a 90-second outage on April 28.
The radar also briefly went down on Friday.
On Sunday, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded flights at the airport for 45 minutes.
ABC 7 reports:
Air traffic controllers on Friday could be heard telling a FedEx plane that their screens went dark and then asked them to tell their company to put pressure on to get the problem fixed. In another transmission, the controller is heard telling a private jet arriving from Cyprus that they just had a brief radar outage and to stay at or above 3,000 feet in case they can’t get in touch during their descent.
Friday’s outage was the third time in two weeks that radars failed at the facility in Philadelphia where controllers manage the airspace in and around Newark.
The week prior, an outage at Newark caused ATC computer screens to go dark for roughly 60 to 90 seconds and prevented controllers from talking to aircraft during that time, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the incident. As a result, the FAA briefly halted all departures to the airport.
Following the outage, several controllers went on medical leave, calling the experience a traumatic event. The controllers are entitled to at least 45 days away from the job and must be evaluated by a doctor before they can return to work.
The FAA issued a statement about the flight stoppage saying, “There was a telecommunications issue at Philadelphia TRACON Area C, which guides aircraft in and out of Newark Liberty International Airport airspace. The FAA briefly slowed aircraft in and out of the airport while we ensured redundancies were working as designed. Operations have returned to normal, get real-time updates at www.fly.faa.gov.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he plans to reduce the number of flights in and out of the airport for the “next several weeks.”
“We want to have a number of flights that if you book your flight, you know it’s going to fly, right?” Duffy said. “That is the priority. So you don’t get to the airport, wait four hours, and then get delayed.”
The US is currently facing a shortage of approximately 3,000 air traffic controllers.
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