WASHINGTON — Air traffic controllers are facing about 1,000 equipment failures per week — and “more and more” are expected without a serious “overhaul” of the ancient systems, a former FAA official and several airline industry insiders tell The Post.
The shocking revelation follows the 90-second radar and comms blackout for controllers overseeing Newark Liberty International Airport, which resulted in a cascade of cancellations and delays that has lasted more than a week.
A fried piece of copper wire caused the April 28 outage. Following the incident, five FAA workers in the Philadelphia-based control center took federal “trauma leave” of up to 45 days, according to CNN.
“This is a copper wire system, and frankly the FAA is experiencing almost 1,000 outages a week,” one airline industry official said of the fiasco. “Some outages are worse than others — but the bad thing about them is you can’t predict them.”
Industry officials explained that the miles of telecommunications wire snaking its way through systems from New York to California are being overloaded by the tens of thousands of flights Americans take every day — and the historic lack of certified professional controllers (CPCs) overseeing the planes.
It’s an “increasingly urgent” problem, they said.
Another airline industry insider said most of the technology currently in use is, at best, late 1980s, early 1990s-era, making it a “top priority” for lawmakers to address in upcoming reconciliation and appropriations bills if possible.
David Grizzle, who served under President Barack Obama as the FAA’s chief counsel, acting deputy administrator and chief operating officer of its Air Traffic Organization, said the current “air traffic control dilemma” is entirely due to “archaic” equipment, a shortage of air traffic controllers and “inadequate and inconsistent” 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 went on. “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 October, there were 1,020 fewer certified professional controllers than there were at the end of fiscal year 2012 — a 9% decrease.
Just 34 controllers were added through hiring last year.
In total, there are 10,791 certified controllers at the FAA spread across 300 air traffic control facilities monitoring 50,000 flights per day.
Asked about the 90-second blackout that air traffic controllers suffered, Grizzle noted that it was certainly the most “dramatic” incident in recent memory but that an “unscheduled outage” is likely to be seen “more and more.”
“The nature of an unscheduled outage is you don’t know where it’s going to happen,” he warned — and despite it being less than two minutes, “if a plane is traveling at 555 miles per hour, a few seconds is significant.”
Grizzle also cautioned that passengers should still feel safe given the other guidelines the agency is applying nationwide.
“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 added.
“We’re having to cancel hundreds of flights because we simply don’t have the technology and staffing to manage them.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is preparing Thursday to announce an “overhaul” of much of the outdated and understaffed FAA with a recruiting blitz, “cutting-edge technology” and a consolidation of the roughly two dozen air traffic control towers into just five or six state-of-the-art centers, the insiders added.
In a Fox News interview Monday night, Duffy slammed the Biden administration for doing “nothing” to fix the mounting problems at the FAA — including its telecom system.
“It hasn’t been updated in the last 30 to 40 years,” he declared, before explaining what happened in Newark.
“The primary communication line went down, the backup line didn’t fire, and so for 30 seconds, we lost contact with air traffic control,” he said on “The Ingraham Angle.”
“Were planes going to crash? No, they have communication devices. They can see other air traffic,” he added. “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 serves as chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, is hoping to push for at least $4.75 billion to upgrade the telecom system in the coming year.
On Wednesday, the FAA released a statement announcing that “three new, high-bandwidth telecommunications connections” would be added between the New York-based radar processing location and the Philadelphia one.
The agency is also hiring more air traffic controllers and replacing the copper wires with fiberoptic ones for higher bandwidth and greater speed and setting up a “temporary backup system” at the Philly-based radar processing center.
Just 22 CPCs serve at the Philadelphia center, known as TRACON, along with 21 other controllers and supervisors in training.
“We have a healthy pipeline with training classes filled through July 2026,” a spokesperson for the agency 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, CEO of the leading trade association for cargo and passenger planes, told Congress in a March hearing that around 90% of the FAA’s facilities and equipment budget is used just to patch up issues in the existing system.
“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.”
Industry officials said there will likely be a push for an even higher $30 billion or $40 billion supplementary request in the coming months.
A Government Accountability Office report last December found that “of the FAA’s 138 systems,” at least 27% “were unsustainable” and 39% were “potentially unsustainable.”
There are also concerns about how so-called “slot relief,” a system that forces roughly 10% fewer flights at a given airport, has been unnecessarily deflating the number of flights daily at high-traffic hubs like JFK and LaGuardia, prompting a letter from Calio’s group, Airlines for America, in April.
That missive requested an extension until 2027 of slot relief to allow for increased hiring and updated tech before taking on the higher daily total of flights.
It also noted that “approximately 75% of all delays in the National Airspace System” occur in NYC 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 noted.
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