The FAA’s problems with air traffic control in Newark have captured national attention and stoked flying fears even further, building on concerns after several high-profile accidents and incidents earlier this year. Newark’s problems culminated in several radar and communications outages over the past few months. As with many problems, the Newark ATC conundrum is comprised of multiple parts and won’t be resolved quickly.
At its core, Newark’s problem is one of limited airspace for an increasing number of airplanes. The FAA has minimum separation standards for aircraft, but the optimal numbers are reduced by both bad weather and equipment outages. When things start going wrong, ATC implements increased separation for aircraft or holds them on the ground prior to departure to create more space.
On a recent trip to Teterboro, New Jersey, we were subjected to a ground stop that was projected to delay our departure for two hours. The reason given was short staffing in the Newark sector. Teterboro is a busy general aviation hub that is so close to Newark that the approaches and departures are interlaced. Newark arrivals landing south go right over the top of Teterboro. Since we were flexible and the delay did not impact the entire New York area, we shifted our flight to White Plains on the north side of the metro area and departed on schedule. (For a Southern boy, the audible distinction between “Newark” and “New York” is subtle. I’d be interested to hear how the two sound when locals say them.)
Before we delve into Newark’s issues, let’s talk about ATC in general. The modern air traffic control system traces its roots to a 1978 accident in which a single-engine Cessna 172 collided with a Boeing 727 over San Diego, killing 144 people. Following this accident, the FAA beefed up the nation’s air traffic system with several different levels of controlled airspace. Thirty-seven busy metropolitan airports are surrounded by heavily restricted Class B airspace, while smaller city airports are protected by Class C airspace, which is still regulated but more navigable and welcoming to smaller private aircraft. Class B and C airspace includes a TRACON, a terminal radar approach control, which provides ATC and radar services for aircraft. (Class A airspace is above 18,000 feet.)
Even smaller and less busy airports can have Class D airspace, which includes a control tower but no TRACON. The majority of airports in the US are nontowered airports where traffic follows guidelines to self-regulate and sequence for takeoff and landing.
Air Route Traffic Control Centers (ARTCCs) fill the radar gaps between TRACONs for en route aircraft. These centers can also provide radar services and sequencing for aircraft on instrument flight rules (IFR) flight plans to Class D and nontowered airports. There are 20 ARTCCs in the United States.
Newark Liberty Airport (KEWR) is one of the primary airports in the New York Class B airspace. The airspace around New York City is some of the most congested and complex in the world, comprising not only three major air carrier airports but numerous general aviation and mixed-use airports as well. The airspace around NYC mixes everything from heavy jumbo jets to military aircraft to corporate jets to helicopters to single-engine private planes to seaplanes operating on the Hudson River.
It is this mix of aircraft that New York Approach is expected to control. The Verge reports that New York controllers handle more than 6,000 flights per day. Newark TRACON works an average of 3,400 flights per day, up from 2,200 in 1980. Controllers here have a high workload and a stressful job.
The situation at Newark is made worse by recent changes. ARTCCs and TRACONs are not always located on-site, and that is the case with Newark. In 1978, Newark Approach was consolidated with other New York TRACONs in a single facility on Long Island. CNN reports that much of Newark’s problem can be traced to a first-term Trump decision to move the control of Newark and several other New Jersey airports (Teterboro, Morristown, Caldwell, and Linden) to the Philadelphia TRACON in an attempt to alleviate delays and understaffing at the New York TRACON. That move was completed in July 2024 despite opposition by New York’s congressional delegation, and the plan seems to have backfired.
The downside to the move was that the Newark controllers did not want to leave Long Island for Philly. Going back to The Verge’s reporting, ATC salaries were subpar for the New York area and had not kept pace with inflation. Even with relocation bonuses of up to $100,000, only 17 of the 33 original controllers agreed to the move. Another seven were temporarily reassigned, but the 24 controllers assigned to the Newark airspace were far short of the target staffing of 63. That meant forced overtime and more stressful working conditions.
To make matters worse, the FAA skimped on the technology when it moved control of Newark. Rather than providing an independent server for the Philadelphia TRACON, it elected to “mirror” data from the Long Island facility via 130 miles of copper telecommunications cables in a cost-saving move. It seems likely that this system was to blame for some of Newark’s outages.
The FAA hardware is shaky as well. The last ATC upgrade dates back to about 2007, and the DOGE buzzsaw cut many of the maintenance specialists who kept the antiquated systems up and running (although it spared air traffic controllers). It seems more than just a coincidence that outages started to plague Newark shortly after the cuts.
The equipment problems have compounded the ATC labor shortage as controllers take medical leave after the trauma of radar and communications outages. Most of us will never know the pressure of having hundreds of lives in your hands as you try to keep aircraft separated without being able to see or talk to them. Near misses can happen on good days. When vital equipment breaks down, the danger meter pegs.
The current Trump Administration has advocated a complete overhaul of the air traffic control system over four years at a cost of untold billions. That money has to be approved by Congress, but Trump has not proven adept at building coalitions to pass legislation. His “Big Beautiful Bill” reportedly includes $12.5 billion for ATC modernization, but the bill’s future is not assured and that money would only be a down payment. It does not help that Trump and DOGE have poisoned the well at both Congress and the FAA.
“One day, we’re going [to] be required to fire 20 percent of everybody,” one FAA manager told the Washington Post anonymously. “And the next day, [DOT Secretary] Sean Duffy says we’re going to have a huge injection of tens of billions of dollars. It’s just weird.”
The FAA is also attempting to hire new controllers, but this is also a long-term solution. The FAA’s ATC academy takes several months to complete, but newly minted controllers cannot be tossed into the Northeast Corridor airspace immediately. Classroom and simulator training are followed by several years of supervised on-the-job training before controllers are fully certified and checked out on their airspace.
One potential reform is privatizing ATC. First-term Trump proposed such an overhaul, and the idea has been proposed periodically in the past. Privatization on the order of making ATC a separate semi-private corporation or public utility has both proponents and opponents on both sides of the aisle. The airlines typically favor the idea, but unions and private flyers oppose it. Adding ATC costs to the already expensive prospect of learning to fly could make the pilot shortage even more acute, among other problems. Air traffic control is currently funded by an airline ticket tax and a general aviation fuel tax. That is unlikely to change in the near term.
Passengers and airlines won’t want to hear it, but the best practical solution in the near term is to simply reduce the number of flights going into congested areas. The FAA has already announced reductions in the number of flights in and out of Newark for the next several months.
As with many of the problems that we face in America, the problems with Newark airport and the FAA in general did not arise overnight, and they also won’t be solved quickly.
At least Transportation Secretary Duffy seems to understand that Newark is a bellwether, and that the government needs to get a handle on the problems before they spread throughout the ATC system.
“If we don’t actually accomplish the mission that we are announcing today, you will see Newarks not just in Newark, you will see Newarks in other parts of the country,” Duffy told the Washington Post.
One thing we can all agree on is that one Newark is enough.
As I’ve said elsewhere, people imagine that “privatization” is going to fix things because somehow there’s Magic Private Juice that gets more work from less workers.
What’s happening is that private industries, non-unionized, are allowed to tell people “work unpaid overtime or you’re fired”. So that gets recorded as “more work done without more hours charged”, and makes private industry look more efficient.
Effective government services cost money. Updating the underlying systems that make government function costs money. Continuing to recruit, train and retain really smart people to do complex work delivering effective government services costs money.
Government raises money for services through taxation. Spending 50 years cutting taxes in the name of fictional “growth” costs money, both in terms of foregone revenue for services and in ineffective and ill conceived patches to try and keep it all together.
We are now reaping the sowing of those lies by the GOP. And sadly the lies as characterized in the reconciliation bill before Congress and the appropriations bills it will have to pass after will not make any of this better.
Those lies now have quantifiable economic costs and will soon add quantifiable human lives cost as well. This is a national tragedy of our own making because everyone wants to be rich and no one wants to pay for someone else to enjoy the same services the first person gets.
We are having the days and weeks and years we voted for because believing the lies was easier. It will cost a lot of money to fix that too.
This part of the gov’s budget is getting squeezed out by “mandatory” payments.
The gov runs out of political will to tax before it runs out of things it could tax.
The political will could be created by frank discussions of what all this costs.
This part of the gov’s budget is getting squeezed by the Republicans determinations to destroy literally every tax that wealth people could hypothetically pay and make sure they don’t have to pay any that are left.
What is blowing the holes in the budget is, objectively, Republican’s insanity with ‘must always cut taxes’. It has nothing to do with spending, spending is not out of control, spending has not even particularly changed.
Over the years I’ve noticed that Newark and LaGuardia get clobbered by weather and traffic in ways that JFK (and Dulles) doesn’t.
It’s pretty common for me to get stuck at (or going to) LaGuardia with rolling delays, then cancellation. My last trip a couple weeks ago coincided with both the weather and the ATC issues… I sat at Dulles from 3:00 until 9:00 when they cancelled the flight, grabbed a seat on the 10:00 and sat until 1:00, then boarded, taxied and sat on the runway until 2:00 before taking off. Pilot was trying to get a gate to return to, but admitted after 30 min that if he’d found a gate before ATC said 2:00 would work that they probably would’ve cancelled the flight.
Return trip 2 full days later, I got notified at 10am that my 7pm flight was already delayed. Cancelled, booked Amtrak and Ubered to my car at Dulles.
Weather causes delays, of course, but the over-capacity issues just makes that route regularly fail. Would rather see reduced capacities and higher costs than play this pretend game that the system has enough elasticity to handle ordinary weather situations.
I can 100% understand huge ATC employee pipeline issues… I’m not sure the job will ever reward the stress adequately. I bet AI is being tested somewhere for this… more likely to invest in automation than people.
I just got back from 2 weeks in the UK and boy did I enjoy riding the rails. London to Exeter and London to Dundee, very nearly without a hitch and pretty inexpensive. I know our esteemed editor always pooh poohs the idea of American train travel, but it seems to me that the East Coast would be ripe for an extensive, frequent departure rail service.
No security to go through, no arriving 2 hours before departure (heck, they don’t even announce the platform until about 20 minutes before departure), and no weather to deal with. I’ll take that over flying any day.
Went to Italy a few years ago, flew into Milan, took a train from the airport into the city (the Milan airport is way outside of Milan for some reason), took a subway to a soccer game and to other parts of town. When it was time to leave Milan, we took a train to Parma, where we walked everywhere, including across the entire city in about 30 minutes. Then a few days later we took a train to Modena, where we walked everywhere, including pretty much the entire diameter of the city. After a couple days, we took a train to Bologna, where we walked around the entire city for a few days. Then we took a bullet train back to Milan, walked around for a day, took the subway to a train, and a train to the airport. All in all, we spent 2 weeks in the country, 4 cities, dozens of sites, restaurants, museums, libraries, stores, etc., saw Inter at San Siro, saw a different musical concert almost every night, met up with friends and family, and didn’t set foot inside a motor vehicle of any sort. It was glorious.
We could have been a proper country.
“We could have been a proper country.”
You could move to Europe and live there if you wanted. Nobody’s stopping you! Just go!
Yes, getting up and moving to another continent is as simple as packing up and hopping on a plane, and it makes absolutely no sense that anyone who doesn’t like this country hasn’t done it.
I’m sure I’ve mentioned here before that my partner is an Italian citizen, and therefore has an EU passport. Moving to pretty much anywhere in Europe would be much easier for us than for most Americans, and we’ve talked about it extensively (not just Italy; she was recently offered a fellowship in Freiburg), but there are too many barriers, from jobs to family to language.
So I’m sorry for wishing this country were better. I promise I’ll get in line and recognize this country’s extremely alienating infrastructure, lack of public transit, and city planning are the best on the planet.
Europe would be perfect except the barriers? Welp.
Europe would be perfect, except for the barriers, most of which have to do with our lives, and not anything about Europe, yes.
Interestingly, two of the most conservative (in a non-Trumpy way) people I know personally moved to Europe, one to Perugia in the late Aughts, and one to a suburb of Lisbon two years ago, and neither can imagine ever moving back. Italy is in many ways a libertarian-type conservative’s dream; it’s the wild west, as my friend likes to call it, “Everybody just does whatever they want.” He’s also blown away by the sense of community. For example, every evening after dinner and before work, instead of retreating into their homes for the rest of the night, or at best traveling via personal vehicle to a bar or restaurant, everyone goes for a stroll and socializes with everyone else in a piazza or parco near their home. I don’t know much about Portugal, but I gather it’s similar, both in its wildness and its sociality.
It does not escape my notice that your itinerary took you to culinary summits. Not only did you enjoy the benefits of an intelligent transportation infrastructure, you also got to enjoy some really fantastic food. My envy is exceeded only by my vicarious pleasure in your experience.
I know you know who built most of that expansive infrastructure…
Hell, he build San Siro (and it looks like it).
Though Milan has substantially added to its subway system, initially built well after the man who hung from his tows, in recent years, at a fraction of the cost, and in a fraction of the time, that it would take any city in the U.S. to do so.
Meanwhile, Austin is trying to build a few miles of above-ground rail at a higher cost, and with such delays in even breaking ground that it’s likely either the state legislature or the US DOT will kill the entire project before it’s gone beyond the spending of millions of dollars on outside consultants.
Why can’t American Governments build anything? Here is one thought on it.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/ar-AA1Frszo
Ah yes – let’s go back to trashing all the rule. We won’t need fair market value in eminent domain or environmental impact review or any sort of zoning (even if it wildly popular in a given municipality). And of course the thing dragging government down is its own regulation, not understaffing or over litigation against every decision made.
Idiots.
Thanks for providing the circular and self contradicting view on the subject from the left Philip. Of course, the solution to the problem of administrative paralysis is just more unthinking funding and more employment for existing administrative organizations- it’s so obvious.
Yes, let’s all grant the power to the Federal government where, in an emergency, they can use medical data in ways not explicitly authorized by law. What a dumb objection the left has to that.
This cannot possibly backfire, it’s not like we have any examples of the government misusing emergency declarations _or_ having anyone ‘in the government’ running around collecting and misusing personal data. Neither of those things has happened in recent memory or is happening literally right not. (Please note, it is currently January 19th where I am.)
And we’ll make sure that the left will not, next pandemic, block emergencies measures, like they did last time…why, I remember all the left-based protests over all those Covid emergencies measures like masks and quarantines. (It’s actually January 19th in a parallel universe, one where the right is in favor of emergency measures during medical emergencies and the left is not.)
(Yeah, I know that’s not the point of what he said, but, damn, is that is a stupid example to include right now or what?)
We could, at any time, simply announce that mistakes were made in the long series of bankruptcies where we left what are now the Union Pacific and BNSF railroad companies holding on to enormously valuable rights of way. Building passenger rail would be much more feasible if the rights of way were publicly owned and the government could tell the freight carriers that they were now the second-class users. I hold out a small hope that we are moving away from coal fast enough to push the UP and BNSF into bankruptcy again, and that the Front Range urban corridor can pick up the urban/suburban rights of way here for a song.
Europe didn’t make that mistake.
The eastern seaboard is the one place I think it could really work. Whether we’d ever be able to coordinate it across jurisdictions and the mountains of red tape is another question. Or rather a question we probably all already know the answer to.
Yeah, I don’t think our federal system is set up for such a system. There’s certainly the population density east of the Mississippi to support an intercity rail network, but I think the amount of salesmanship it would take to convince Americans to use it is beyond our capabilities.
I heard a fair bit of grumbling over there about how terrible the trains are, and all I could think is, “Buddy, you don’t know what you have.” My Exeter friend was mildly outraged that the train was 7 minutes late.
Over the years I’ve noticed that Newark and LaGuardia get clobbered by weather and traffic in ways that JFK (and Dulles) doesn’t.
Something to do with where they stack planes and the approach paths? I understand that LaGuardia doesn’t have in-air stacking, and that Newark has very limited in-air. It probably doesn’t take a lot to mess up the approaches there. JFK and Dulles have substantial space for in-air stacking.
When I first moved to Denver and Stapleton Airport was still in use, on a clear night you could see a line of 8-10 planes stretching off to the east with their landing lights on. Stapleton was horrible when the weather got bad, though. The runways were short and too close together so they were down to one runway regularly. Because of the hub arrangements at the time, when Stapleton went to one runway, it screwed up air traffic across much of the West. The FAA was a big advocate for building the new Denver International airport.
Back when I lived in California, a neighbor and friend was an ATC supervisor at the Los Angeles ARTCC. Which is not located anywhere near LAX; it’s up in the desert north of the city where I used to live. This is a big operation; about 500 employees working 24/7. My friend disabused me of the notion that this is a particularly stressful job; he described most of the work being done automatically by computer algorithm, with the individual ATC mostly “playing goalie” by giving instructions to aircraft that were deviating too far from the algorithm’s pattern governing where lanes of air traffic moving in different directions would go and around columns of military-only airspace (of which there’s a lot more in western states than in, say, the Northeastern Corridor).
I presume that unstated in his description of the day-to-day work was that the ATC team would need to be able to take over and operate the system at a moment’s notice in the event something bad happened to the computer. Understanding how to do that is probably a big part of the training. And we ought be glad of it — computers are vulnerable to mishap and sabotage, despite the best efforts of smart people to make them safe and secure.
The possibility that keeps sitting in my brain is a bunch of tech dudes from Elon Musk’s team holding a lot of confidence in their tech saying, “We can let some of these people go and just automate the system more, and realize savings that way.” Which could actually be fine — until it isn’t. And it’s the “until it isn’t” that we’re paying for, because when those tech vulnerabilities manifest, the results are dramatic and catastrophic. The nightmarish scenario is letting, say, 10% of the workplace go and increasing automation and then nothing bad happens for a while, and then someone saying, “Well, that worked great! Let’s do it some more” and now another 10% get let go and then a third round and then… then there aren’t enough people and the system has been made much more fragile so the break, when it happens, is really bad.
That’s one of the ways fiascos happen, and an air traffic control fiasco could look like hundreds of people dead.
The possibility that keeps sitting in my brain is a bunch of tech dudes from Elon Musk’s team holding a lot of confidence in their tech saying, “We can let some of these people go and just automate the system more, and realize savings that way.” Which could actually be fine — until it isn’t. And it’s the “until it isn’t” that we’re paying for, because when those tech vulnerabilities manifest, the results are dramatic and catastrophic. The nightmarish scenario is letting, say, 10% of the workplace go and increasing automation and then nothing bad happens for a while, and then someone saying, “Well, that worked great! Let’s do it some more” and now another 10% get let go and then a third round and then… then there aren’t enough people and the system has been made much more fragile so the break, when it happens, is really bad.
Yeah, it is worth emphasizing how incredibly, astonishingly stupid this premise is. It cannot be stressed enough.
This works in some universe where the system load is near constant _and_ systems degrade instead of breaking. But, as you point out, systems often catastrophic break, and thus require even more resources to fix than it takes to run them. On top of that, nothing is ever magically average, and you run the very real risk of firing during a lull.
There are some people in positions in this world that basically are living examples of failing upward due to money, and two of them are currently running this country.
My friend disabused me of the notion that this is a particularly stressful job; he described most of the work being done automatically by computer algorithm, with the individual ATC mostly “playing goalie” by giving instructions to aircraft that were deviating too far from the algorithm’s pattern governing where lanes of air traffic moving in different directions would go and around columns of military-only airspace (of which there’s a lot more in western states than in, say, the Northeastern Corridor).
So there’s a joke in theatre about tech work: It’s 10 minutes of sitting around followed by 10 seconds of controlled near-panic, then repeat. Most of the time you’re doing nothing, but when it is time to do something, you have to do it exactly right, down the second, and as fast as possible.
But it’s pretty unlikely anyone will die if you screw up.
Anyway, just because a computer is doing 95% of ATC doesn’t mean that humans don’t have to understand everything that is going on, because it’s still a lot left over. The John Oliver segment on it talked about how, yeah, most of the time it wasn’t stressful, but if just 1% of your job is ‘Make sure these two airplanes do not crash into each other, killing everyone’, that’s actually pretty stressful! It’s stressful at 0.01%…that’s an average of 3 seconds every day where you might kill some people.
I would be legitimately curious to read a David Thornton review of season 2 of HBO’s The Rehearsal.
It could be worse. You could have to construct Air traffic centers that can withstand IRA mortar attacks from nearby public roads, like they did at NERC near Southampton UK. I know, I was there.
As John Oliver pointed out, and this failed to mention: Air Traffic Control really never recovered from Reagan firing all the striking workers. In fact, the current crisis is, in a large part, due to the fact that everyone hired to replace them is retiring all at once.