Washington, Sep 22: Damaged communications lines at a key air traffic control facility in Philadelphia had been repaired, allowing airports across the US Northeast to resume operations after hours of disruptions, the nation’s transportation secretary said.
Hundreds of flights were cancelled, including more than 600 into and out of Newark Liberty International Airport, as the outage hit every major airport in the New York City area on Monday.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in an online post that “it will take some time to clear all existing delays” despite the repairs.
The primary communications line at the Federal Aviation Administration facility in Philadelphia had failed earlier Monday, while the backup fiber optic line was inadvertently severed by railroad construction workers. The failures left controllers without radar or communications for hours.
The outage brought commercial air traffic to a near-standstill at Newark for much of the day, with no commercial flights landing at the airport from about 9:40 am to just after 5:20 pm local time, according to flight-tracking site Flightradar24.
More than 200 flights into and out of Philadelphia International Airport were also cancelled, while disruptions hit LaGuardia and Kennedy airports in New York. By Monday evening, flights were resuming at those airports.
Some airlines were allowing customers to change flights without charge. The FAA advised travellers to check the status of their flights before heading to the airport.
The outage occurred just as President Donald Trump and numerous foreign leaders were flying into New York City for the United Nations General Assembly.
Cindy Phan said her morning flight from Newark to Minneapolis was repeatedly delayed before she learned around 3 pm that it had been cancelled and rescheduled for Tuesday, requiring her to find and pay for another night at a hotel.
“We could have had a whole day in New York,” Phan said, adding that she wanted to get home to her “two little Chihuahua babies”.
The technical problems stem from the same FAA facility in Philadelphia that caused numerous disruptions at the Newark airport last spring.
Regional control centres like these have two lines that carry radar and communications data in and out: the primary and the backup. The FAA said a circuit on the primary failed Monday morning, and when the system tried to switch to the backup, workers discovered that the fibre optic line had been cut.
Earlier in the day, Duffy said an Amtrak construction crew was to blame. Amtrak, however, pointed to a New Jersey Transit construction crew that was working in the area between Newark and New Brunswick, New Jersey.
FAA administrator Bryan Bedford told reporters earlier the agency had focused on fixing the primary connection as soon as possible by installing a new circuit on the primary line, while also working to repair the backup fibre optic line.
Verizon said at the time that its technicians were also working to restore service.
Bedford earlier described the fibre break as “massive,” saying it would take several hours to repair, according to a video posted online by a CBS reporter.
The primary circuit that failed is due to be replaced as part of a massive overhaul of the nation’s air traffic control system.
Also Monday, the FAA began testing a new computer system that uses AI to help predict schedule conflicts and weather issues to help air traffic controllers reroute traffic.
But that system is initially being tested only in the Washington, DC, area, so it did not appear to be linked to the outages.
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