By Alexandra Skores, CNN
Washington, DC (CNN) — When radar and communications at a facility that manages planes preparing to land at Newark Liberty International Airport crashed this past week, it placed the deteriorating technology of the Federal Aviation Administration in the spotlight.
Air traffic controllers in Philadelphia were guiding planes at Newark Airport around 1:30 p.m. on April 28 when their radios went silent and screens went black.
The outage was the result of a failure of copper wiring that transmits information from a facility in New York to Newark Approach Control, a source tells CNN.
And it’s not the first time in the last year controllers lost communication and radar with flights landing at the airport. It happened at least twice before.
The system used to manage air traffic at Newark is “incredibly old,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said.
The FAA announced Wednesday it would add three new, high-bandwidth, telecommunications connections and replace that copper wire with fiberoptic technology to bring data to the controllers. The Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach Control will also have a temporary backup system deployed.
Staffing will also be increased, the FAA added, and there is a “healthy pipeline” of training classes filled through next July.
For years, the FAA’s technology has been under fire for its poor quality and problems. A handful of incidents have happened over the years, yet no recent administration has been able to fully make changes to the aging system.
According to a report from the US Government Accountability Office, an assessment of the FAA’s 138 systems found 51 were unsustainable and 54 were potentially unsustainable.
On Monday, the FAA released a statement, “We are working to ensure the current telecommunications equipment is more reliable in the New York area by establishing a more resilient and redundant configuration with the local exchange carriers. In addition, we are updating our automation system to improve resiliency.”
The FAA also confirmed some controllers who worked on Newark arrivals and departures have taken time off to recover from the stress of the outages. Fast replacements are impossible due to the nature of the job and how specialized it is, but the FAA says it is currently training more controllers through a “supercharged” method.
Years of tech issues
There have been many high-profile issues with FAA technology over the years that have prompted safety concerns.
In 2023, a system that provides pilots with pre-flight safety notices experienced an outage leading to thousands of cancellations and delays. The NOTAM, Notice to Airmen, is separate from the air traffic control system that keeps planes a safe distance from each other, but it’s another critical tool for air safety.
The FAA conducted an operational risk assessment following the outage, ultimately determining the number of systems that were at risk. Of the 105 unsustainable and potentially unsustainable systems, 58 have critical operational impacts on the safety and efficiency of the national airspace, the GAO found.
Other incidents have shown different vulnerabilities in the air traffic control system. In 2014, an FAA contract employee set a fire to sabotage the FAA Chicago En Route Center in Aurora, Illinois. The facility was not able to control air traffic for more than two weeks and thousands of flights were delayed or canceled, an FAA audit found. When firefighters arrived, they found him lying on the floor and slicing his throat with a knife, an FBI affidavit said.
Katie Thomson, the former deputy administrator at the FAA during the Biden administration, said the FAA was planning to transition to new equipment last year after years of being reliant on legacy communication systems.
“Think of traditional analog communication systems that are aging and, in many cases, very expensive to fix or not being fixed by the local telecom companies,” Thomson said.
There’s a FAA Enterprise Network Services Program, also known as FENS, a contract that is supposed to acquire telecommunications services, information management services and other specialized services. The FAA awarded this 15-year contract on March 27, 2023.
Verizon currently has a massive $2.4 billion contract to provide long sought-after upgrades to the communications system. Elon Musk took to X earlier this year to criticize Verizon’s efforts to upgrade the system, calling it “putting air traveler safety at serious risk,” and hinting his company, Starlink, should take over those efforts.
Verizon spokesman Rich Young told CNN the contract is in “the process of being rolled out” and would include a new fiberoptic network, replacing the FAA system’s outdated copper lines.
The FAA told CNN in a statement it is currently testing Starlink at “non-safety critical sites in Alaska to restore stable access to weather information for pilots and the FAA’s flight services stations.”
There are 17 Starlink connections being tested by the FAA’s Telecommunications Infrastructure program, managed through a contract with L3 Harris, including two in Atlantic City, seven in Alaska and eight in Oklahoma, according to the FAA.
At a press conference Monday, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York called the technology “old.”
“It was one of the things that happened at Newark is a copper wire burnt,” Schumer said. “Why are we using copper wire in 2025? Have they heard of fiber?”
A move for Newark air traffic control
While outdated technology is a talking point, some of the current problems at the Newark airport stem from a decision last summer to move approach controllers from a Long Island facility called N90 to Philadelphia.
Then in August, according to an FAA statement, the FAA slowed flights into and out of Newark Airport because of radar feed and frequency issues.
“The reason that the FAA moved the Newark airspace to Philadelphia was because of chronic problems at N90, meaning we were unable to recruit, retain, train air traffic controllers who wanted to stay at N90,” Thomson said. “There was notoriously bad morale.”
Thomson said the FAA had even tried to give monetary incentives, but nothing had worked, resulting in significant delays and sometimes shutdowns in the Northeast corridor at those airports because of insufficient staffing.
According to a published pay scale on the FAA website, an academy graduate in New York starts at $64,230 and certified controllers make a maximum of $225,700. In Philadelphia, academy graduates start at $60,058 and certified controllers make a maximum of $225,700.
The main issue impacting controllers, Thomson believes, is the outdated technology.
“You’re seeing an acceleration of the sort of decay in the older systems that is resulting in these glitchy radar screens that at Newark,” Thomson said. “They are most extreme at Newark, but they’re happening in other places across the system.”
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