During a recent afternoon in Philadelphia, an air traffic controller started screaming that he had lost his Radarfeed for aircraft flying in and from Newark Liberty International Airport.
Some of his colleagues still had radar, but their radios died, causing hectic calls to their counterparts in New York to keep them away from the airspace of Newark.
Then, for 30 dire seconds until the radios returned, there was nothing more to do than hope – because they had no means to tell pilots how to prevent their planes.
Shortly thereafter, a controller discovered a trainee who had focused on Newark a while before, shaking in the hallway.
That was the chaotic scene on Monday 28 April, according to several people who were present when controllers who worked the airspace for Newark lost the means to do their work.
The failure of the system on which the controllers trust had several of those that day with extreme fear, which require a delay of mental health that has caused low staff since days. It has also given rise to more than 1,000 flights on one of the busiest airports in the country to be canceled or delayed, leaving some passengers left behind Feeling frustrated and abandoned.
The battle with staff is ironic because the decision of the Federal Aviation Administration to move some of Newark’s air traffic control operations to Philadelphia was meant to increase the main count last summer.
The nation air traffic control system is plagued by years of dysfunction. The ranks of the controller were exhausted by retirement and a cessation of the training during the pandemic. Since then, recruiting and certifying new controllers is difficult. Existing controllers are tired and even sick due to intense stress and long hours, The New York Times has reported. Some have avoided to seek medical help because this can endanger health care they need to do the work. Turnover is frequent, especially in the midst of diseases, unrest in the family or safety edge.
The outages and his after effects At Newark have led to public outrage.
Transport secretary Sean Duffy, who supervises the FAA, has called for ‘a brand new air traffic control system’. Senator Chuck Schumer from New York, the minority leader, has said that the FAA is ‘really a mess’. Scott Kirby, the Chief Executive of United Airlines, the largest user of Newark, said the airport “Can’t handle the number of aircraft that is planned to work there” and to blame controllers who “walked off the work”.
But the current and former controllers, who asked for an anonymity for fear of retaliation, and people who witnessed last week’s disruptions, said that the time of the controllers was not suitable under the circumstances, given the hardships to work under such coercion. They also described the nerve -racking incident as the highlight of nine months of technical problems that have eroded the confidence of the Newark team in the reliability of the tools that are essential for doing his work.
Last August, in an incident that was later partially accused of an external technician who accidentally cut a data feed of an external location, a controller lost about 90 seconds of radar, according to people who were there. A week later, Radar Scopes froze several times, according to FAA activities logbooks that were assessed by the Times. Then, about eight months later, the malfunctions of April 28, What legislators have blamed for a “fried” copper wirehappened.
“What we can collect now are the communication lines that feed the Newark sector, which lives in Philadelphia, fail,” said Dave Spero, the president of Professional Aviation Safety Specialists, a trade union that represents technicians of airway transport systems, in an interview. He said that contractors, not the FAA himself, were responsible for those lines.
De FAA said that it worked closely with facility managers and suppliers to tackle telecommunications problems in the national airspace system, especially in the northeast. Mr Duffy said that the FAA “had delayed the system” to guarantee the safety of travelers at Newark.
The FAA has acknowledged that some Newark controllers have taken free time to tackle the stress of recent malfunctions. On Tuesday the desk said It had delayed arrivals and departure at NewarkPartly due to staff shortages. It added that the “immediate steps took to improve the reliability of the activities” at the airport, including the installation of new, high-band width dataonnections, implementing a back-up system to Philadelphia and increasing staff under the Newark controller rangs.
Mr Duffy is expected from Thursday to announce additional details of a planned overhaul for air traffic control, on which he has been working since then A collision for the air near Ronald Reagan National Airport Outside Washington, 67 people killed this year.
De FAA said in a statement that there were 22 certified Newark controllers in Philadelphia and almost as much in training.
But that is not the whole picture. Due to the leave of mental health care and other human resources, there are currently only 16 certified controllers available to call every day, according to people who are familiar with the situation, and more than double that number would usually be needed to cover all shifts.
Aerial experts say – and the FAA acknowledges – that there are no quick solutions for the controller’s shortages.
Being a controller for a busy airspace such as Newark, usually requires years of nut-and-bolt training and experience in other busy air spaces close to large cities.
Even an experienced controller who participated in the Newark team from a hub such as Atlanta or San Diego would need up to a year of specialized training to be familiar with the nuances of the traffic of Newark – which usually involves 80 or more departure and landings in a certain hour – according to controllers with knowledge of those airspace. In addition, Newark controllers treat traffic at smaller regional airports, including Teterboro, NJ
Controllers who worked the Newark air spacious from Philadelphia would be the solution instead of the problem. The FAA reasoned that the relatively low costs of living in the neighborhood of Philadelphia would attract more employees who wanted to buy houses or raise families, and that the Philadelphia International Airport Control Tower where they would be stationed were newly renovated.
The movement Was loaded from the start. Some controllers resist to leave their perch in Westbury, NY, where they had worked with colleagues who used flights in and from Laguardia Airport and Kennedy International Airport for years or even decades.
Some controllers who argued at the FAA that the move would place excessive hardships over their families were allowed to stay in Westbury. Others chose to take their chances in Philadelphia and collected a $ 100,000 incentive payment. Their workstations in the new building, which had spent the FAA $ 36 million to modernize, were equipped with real -time tracking technology.
They reported to their new messages on July 28.
The Controllers for Newark initially worked on a reduced flight schedule to smooth out any nodding. But mid -August, with robust summer trips, standard traffic levels had resumed and from Newark resumed and flights went normally.
Subsequently, a Newark controller in Philadelphia lost about a minute and a half after the technician’s fault, according to two people who were in the control hub that day.
The controller held half dozen planes, including two Jets United Airlines, one of the remembered people at the moment the radar disappeared. Without visual images to guide him, he tried to lead the pilots out of memory, according to three people with knowledge of the incident.
“Attention all aircraft. Radarcontact is lost. Radarcontact is lost,” said the controller, according to an audio recording of the event.
By the time Radar images returned, two people with knowledge of the incident said, one of the flights was far in the airspace of Laguardia and flew over the Hudson River.
The controller, who had decades of experience, The three people with knowledge of the case said within a few days after the incident.
The problems in Philadelphia continued to exist. Less than a week later, travelers from Labor Day made and out in Newark established delays and a basic stop – a temporary stopping of start and landings – due to non -related radar equipment problems, according to the FAA, the Bureau accused “Data transmission issues” in the regional system.
They were a spur of the way in which the FAA dealt with the transfer of Newark flight data to Philadelphia when it moved the controllers, according to the government and trade union officers at that time. Instead of feeding flight data that were generated in Newark directly to Philadelphia, the FAA instead sought the data to Westbury, and then to Philadelphia from there, those officials said.
That meant that the data had to travel further and were also vulnerable to sometimes be overloaded by other hubs in the system experienced glitches, said Mr Spero, the president of the Safety Specialists’ Union.
“It caused what they call a cascade -abuse when freezing the target,” said Mr. Spero. He referred to the dots that represent moving planes on radar screens that, according to FAA logs of that day, froze in different places, which caused a warning.
The FAA said in a statement that it founded a communication system that will not require the Philadelphia facility to trust a new York feed.
Controllers said last fall that, although data and capacities had not had been their main objection to relocation, they had long been a source of fear. It has only become worse as the isolated glitches seem to seem like a trend, said the people who witnessed the recent events in Philadelphia.
A controller who was there on April 28, got his car before he broke into tears, one of those people said. He took free time, added this person and must be cleaned up by a professional in mental health care before he can return.
Mark Walker contributed reporting.
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