Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that the Federal Aviation Administration would be temporarily reducing flights at Newark Liberty International Airport during a press conference on Monday afternoon.
Hours before the conference, the FAA published a statement saying it would slow arrivals and departures at the airport due to runway construction, staffing, and technology issues at the Philadelphia TRACON facility.
Placing Blame
During the conference, Duffy blamed the prior administration for “bungled” telecommunications technology used to manage Newark’s airspace. Duffy said that this radar was moved from New York to Philadelphia by President Joe Biden and former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg without first upgrading necessary lines and infrastructure.
The Philadelphia TRACON radar brought to focus a list of compounding issues at the airport after it briefly went offline Friday for the second time this month.
On Friday, the FAA submitted a notice to the Federal Register announcing a delay reduction meeting for Newark. The meeting is scheduled for Wednesday morning and is open to all scheduled carriers – even those not operating at the airport.
It is currently unknown specifically how many flights will be limited at the airport, and this will likely be determined at the meeting.
This comes as a massive FAA air traffic control system overhaul is in the works, which has drawn backing from industry stakeholders and major airlines to fix aging ATC technology and infrastructure across the country. If this system is approved by Congress, Duffy said that Newark will be prioritized for infrastructure upgrades first.
“We’re in a situation where telecom is going down,” he said during Monday’s press conference. “It’s taken some time to isolate the problem, and we believe we’ve done that, but I don’t think we’re out of the woods yet. We actually have to spend the time now to build the network that should have been built before the [radar] was moved [by the last administration].”
