On June 2nd, US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy traveled to Newark Liberty International Airport to celebrate the reopening of runway 4L-22R. This was unusual: few runway openings are glamorous enough to warrant a visit from the airport’s CEO, let alone a cabinet secretary. But as we reported last month, few airports have come to symbolize USDOT’s mismanagement of the air traffic control system as much as Newark.
The ceremony and press conference was meant to transform Newark into a different symbol — one of progress and action. In his speech, Duffy positioned Newark’s problems as solvable, and the people onstage — who included the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)’s Acting Administrator Chris Rocheleau, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby, and several other dignitaries — as the problem-solvers.
Together, they’d gotten union labor to rebuild a runway in 47 days instead of 60; they’d convinced Verizon to expedite a new fiber-optic cable; they’d identified and fixed the “glitch in the system” that left Newark’s air traffic controllers blind and unable to speak to pilots for several terrifying minutes.
Because of this whirlwind of activity, Rocheleau expected that Newark would soon be able to increase its flight volume by 25 percent, or nearly 12 additional flights per hour.
Or, as Kirby put it, “This is such a seminal turning point for not just the near term but the long term of Newark.”
Within two days, all three men were proven wrong. On the evening of June 4th, a shortage of air traffic controllers forced Newark to issue a ground stop, delaying more than 100 flights for several hours. Another staffing-related delay occurred four days later. Optimism alone cannot solve infrastructure problems that have been decades in the making.
Especially when they are far more widespread than most people realize. Besides the three days of crisis at Newark — on April 28th, May 1st, and May 9th — there have been at least a dozen instances where equipment or staffing problems significantly affected operations at air traffic control centers around the country this year.
The most serious incidents occurred at air traffic control facilities in Kansas City in January, Oakland in February, and Denver in May. Each time, controllers were unable to see or communicate with pilots after radar and radio failures. The Denver outage lasted for only 90 seconds, but the others persisted for more than an hour. Each one resulted in widespread delays and cancellations.
In March at Baltimore’s Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI), an electrical fire blamed on “overloaded aging equipment” halted operations for more than two hours, leading to 50 flight cancellations and more than 150 delays.
And twice this year, the FAA’s Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system — a real-time database of every flying hazard and traffic advisory that covers the entirety of American airspace — has gone down for several hours at a time, leading to more than 1,300 delays and cancellations.
It isn’t just the technology that’s causing problems. The FAA is short more than 3,000 air traffic controllers nationwide. This shortage has forced several air traffic control facilities to issue “staffing triggers,” reducing the number of flights in their airspace to accommodate reduced controller levels. Staffing triggers have occurred air traffic control facilities responsible for Austin twice, the regional airports around New York three times, and once each at Chicago, Los Angeles, and Miami this year.
Even this may not present the full picture of the depth and breadth of the air traffic control system crisis. This list only includes incidents that have been reported by local news outlets, or that can be retrieved in the FAA’s Air Traffic Control System Command Center (ATCSCC) advisory database — a system that purges most advisories after two weeks.
To put this in perspective, there have been 162 days in 2025 so far. On at least 16 of those days — nearly one in 10 — a major portion of the air traffic system has failed somewhere in America.
A recent Government Accountability Office report from September 2024 found that 90 percent of the nation’s critical air traffic control infrastructure was due or past due for a “technology refresh.” Nearly half of the 138 systems surveyed were “considered unsustainable” or “potentially unsustainable” due to shortfalls in funding, insufficient maintenance expertise, or even a lack of spare parts. (For example, a 2023 FAA review found that the systems that track airplanes in the air and on the ground use more than 700 beacons that are more than 20 years old, and whose manufacturers no longer make spare parts.)
The FAA has been aware of this problem for decades. In 2003, the agency began to scope a “Next Generation” air traffic control system. This NextGen system would replace the current infrastructure that had been “developed in the 1940s and 1950s … and was no longer able to handle increases in air traffic,” and would be delivered by 2025.
But the delivery year has arrived, and NextGen still exists mainly on paper. The agency has yet to achieve even its minimum target of launching every major NextGen system at a single major airport by 2025, let alone the “full implementation” that it originally promised by the end of the year. Some critical systems may not come online until 2030, including the replacement for the air-to-ground communications system that has failed at Newark, Denver, and elsewhere.
Air traffic controllers are still asked to maintain the same levels of safety despite using equipment that’s decades out of date. But they aren’t being supported, either. The vast majority of air traffic control centers are below target staffing levels. More than half don’t even meet a lower “FAA standard” of 85 percent of target staffing levels. To compensate, controllers are often required to work six days a week, 10 hours a day. One air traffic controller on Reddit called this “the worst time to be an American ATC since 1981” — the year that air traffic controllers went on strike for better wages, and President Ronald Reagan responded by firing more than 11,000 of them.
On May 8th, Secretary Duffy unveiled a “Brand New Air Traffic Control System Plan,” an eight-page “framework to reinvest in the National Airspace System.” While the ambition is there, the details are decidedly not. Problems this intractable will require several years of sustained funding, political support, and proper management and administration. This combination of factors has not existed since at least the early 2000s, if indeed it ever has.
So while Secretary Duffy is right to acknowledge the work that’s been done to fix the problems at Newark and around the country, there’s still a long way to go — and no one silver bullet that can fix two decades’ worth of neglect.
Source: The Verge
