Federal Aviation Administration/Airlines&Airplanes

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Air traffic controllers lost communication with Newark planes – leading to widespread delays after they took leave for trauma

Air traffic controllers who lost communication with aircraft at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, leading to hundreds of delays for more than a week, are taking special government leave for traumatic situations to recover from the stress.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/05/us/newark-airport-additional-flight-delays

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What to know about flight delays and cancellations at Newark airport

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — Flight delays and cancellations persisted at Newark Liberty International Airport Monday, and the Federal Aviation Administration says some air traffic controllers were taking time off to destress from recent equipment and telecommunications outages.

https://apnews.com/article/newark-airport-delays-staffing-issue-cc949525e6c1d4f22d16809ead69e1e4?

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Future of flying?

Aircraft manufacturer Cirrus is launching a new safety system in a single-engine piston airplane. The “Safe Return” feature will automatically direct the plane to the closest available runway and land in an emergency if the pilot can’t do so.

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The Newark nightmare

Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios

If you're flying any time soon, you may be wise to avoid Newark Liberty International Airport, Axios aviation expert Alex Fitzpatrick writes. Newark has been a mess lately — major disruptions this week left hundreds of flights delayed or canceled — and there's little relief in sight. ⏳ By the numbers: Newark reported 377 delays and 150 cancellations on Tuesday, per FlightAware. At one point Tuesday evening, average delays were approaching a whopping six hours. ? What's happening: The FAA last year moved controllers responsible for Newark approaches and departures from a facility on Long Island to Philadelphia, in a controversial bid to improve chronically short staffing. Technical issues related to the FAA's move have caused multiple brief but harrowing moments where Newark controllers lost their radar feeds and radio frequencies. Several controllers went on trauma leave after those episodes. Long-planned runway maintenance is limiting the number of takeoffs and landings possible. ⚡️ What's next: The FAA on Wednesday announced a series of steps that it's taking to fix Newark's technical issues and controller shortages. But none of those changes will be an overnight fix. ? The bottom line: Delays and cancelations have so far been the worst impacts of the Newark situation. But radar and radio outages in such busy airspace, for any amount of time, present a serious safety threat. Go deeper.   Air traffic controllers briefly lose radar access again at Newark airport The Federal Aviation Administration said the radar at the facility in Philadelphia that directs planes in and out of Newark airport went black for 90 seconds at 3:55 a.m. Friday. That’s similar to what happened on April 28. Read More.

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Turbulent launch

A luxurious double-decker airplane is set to take off next week as the inaugural flight for the startup Global Airlines. The airline’s founder, James Asquith, says it’s been “gruesomely challenging” to get his airline off the ground.

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Another equipment outage impacts flights at Newark Liberty International Airport

Washington  — 

Operations have returned to normal after another air traffic control equipment outage caused the Federal Aviation Administration to implement a ground stop for Newark Liberty International Airport-bound flights Sunday morning.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/11/us/another-equipment-outage-impacts-newark-airport/?

Another issue disrupts Newark’s airport as Trump’s transportation secretary plans reducing flights

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy plans to reduce the number of flights in and out of the Newark Liberty International Airport for the “next several weeks,” as New Jersey’s largest airport struggles with radar outages and other issues, including one Sunday, and flight delays and cancellations due to a shortage of air traffic controllers.

https://apnews.com/article/newark-airport-flight-reduction-transportation-secretary-sean-duffy-ad7ba9d37c41425c2b7ae23a2772e313?

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✈️ Air-traffic warning

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on "Meet the Press" that "what you see in Newark is going to happen ... in other places across the country."

• "It has to be fixed," Duffy added. "We're having ... telecom issues, but we're also having some glitches in our software. As the information comes in, it's overloading some of our lines, and the system goes down."

Go deeper: "Flights Could Be Disrupted Across U.S., Transportation Secretary Warns" (N.Y. Times gift link).

Newark Airport

Another equipment outage forced a ground stop for Newark Liberty International Airport-bound flights on Sunday morning. The glitch followed a 90-second-long radar and radio outage on May 2 at the facility handling flights departing from or arriving at Newark, as well as a similar incident on April 28. No crashes occurred, but five FAA employees ended up taking 45 days of trauma leave. Such events have caused thousands of delays and flight cancellations over the past two weeks — and the summer travel season hasn’t even started yet. While the air traffic controllers who went on leave could be back on the job next month, the antiquated technology that failed them cannot be fixed or replaced quickly. The US also continues to grapple with the worst air traffic controller shortage in nearly 30 years.

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“Famously Underfunded” (Kevin Carter / Getty)

View in browser On this much, there is bipartisan agreement: The Federal Aviation Administration is in a bad mess. After years of exceptional safety, the U.S. air-travel system has recently been beset with near misses and, in one horrifying case, a collision. Air-traffic-control towers are badly understaffed, and controllers have now twice lost—for about 90 seconds and 30 to 90 seconds, respectively—the ability to track flights coming in and out of Newark. “Someone should have seen this coming in the last administration,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy complained yesterday on CNBC. In fact, lots of people saw it coming. Regulators, pilots, controllers, airline executives, and outside observers all warned for years that the system was falling behind and running on outdated technology. Yet successive presidential administrations and Congresses didn’t act, lulled into a false sense of stability by a record 16-year stretch with no fatal commercial-airline crashes in the United States. The struggles of the air-safety regime are especially visceral—few news items are as dramatic as a plane crash, and many people are nervous flyers to begin with—but the FAA is a lot like much of the federal government: It functioned well for a long time, but years of inattention and underfunding have quietly driven it to the brink of collapse. The idea that the FAA can be run on the cheap is an old and enduring one. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan broke a strike by air-traffic controllers demanding more favorable working conditions, firing some 11,000 controllers. One result was a huge influx of new hires, who typically work for 20 to 25 years—which meant big cohorts retiring in the mid-2000s and again around now. The FAA is currently 3,000 controllers shy of its target staffing; the controller in charge when a plane and a helicopter collided in January near the airport named for Reagan was doing double duty. Seeking to ensure safety, the FAA has implemented mandatory overtime—which is both expensive and risks fatigue among controllers, who are then more likely to make mistakes. Duffy is also offering a 20 percent bonus to controllers who stay past retirement age. (The FAA does not currently have a confirmed leader.) The equipment and infrastructure of the FAA are similarly shaky. “We use floppy disks. We use copper wires,” Duffy said after the first Newark outage. “The system that we’re using is not effective to control the traffic that we have in the airspace today.” An FAA official said today that a link between the Pentagon and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport has been inoperable for years. The FAA embarked on a major overhaul of technology in 2007, but it’s still not complete—in part because of underfunding. The 2013 GOP-driven budget-sequestration process slashed the agency’s budget, but Congress allowed the agency to divert funds to pay controllers. Congress’s appropriations for FAA equipment failed to keep pace with inflation, yet in 2016, Republicans in Congress proposed further slashing the FAA’s budget because they were frustrated that the overhaul was not yet complete. In January 2023, Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian made a plea on behalf of the FAA. “I think it’s very clear that there has to be a call to action amongst our political leaders, Congress, and the White House to fund and properly provide the FAA the resources they need to do the job,” he said on a conference call. Later that year, experts identified a series of problems at the FAA, writing in a report, “These challenges, in the areas of process integrity, staffing, and facilities, equipment, and technology, all have ties to inadequate, inconsistent funding.” In 2024, when the Biden administration estimated that the FAA had a $5.2 billion shortfall simply to maintain some operations, then–FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker told a House committee that facilities were “somewhat famously underfunded.” The FAA has other problems as well, including regulatory capture by Boeing in the years leading up to a series of 737 Max failures. Although these issues predate the current administration, the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service have done further damage, as my colleague Isaac Stanley-Becker reported in March. “Many jobs with critical safety functions are indeed being sacrificed, with any possible replacements uncertain because of the government-wide hiring freeze,” he wrote. Donald Trump, meanwhile, baselessly and racistly blamed the January midair collision in Washington, D.C., on DEI programs. The pattern of neglect observed at the FAA can be seen across the federal government. Other physical infrastructure, including bridges, dams, power lines, and highways, are in a serious state of decay. In 2014, a major scandal rocked the Department of Veterans Affairs health system when it emerged that officials, dealing with insufficient capacity, were hiding long waitlists. As Ed Yong wrote in The Atlantic in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic revealed years of deterioration that had weakened the nation’s public-health system (and other systems). The fact that government spending continues to grow is well known, but that growth is driven by mandatory spending on entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security, which grows as the American population ages and increases. Discretionary spending—that is, everything else—has for decades declined as a percentage of GDP. The U.S. is spending much less on these other government services than it did in 1962. Back then, discretionary spending was 12.3 percent of GDP; in fiscal year 2024, it was roughly 6.3 percent. Musk is learning an accelerated lesson that few shortcuts exist in government; that’s one reason DOGE has had to keep recalling federal employees and adjusting down its savings estimates. Everyone wants to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, but most government spending is not wasteful, fraudulent, or abusive. We can and should improve how the government works, but we can’t actually get something for nothing. As with what’s happening to American democracy itself, the risk is in creating a hollowed-out shell—one that appears solid but fails to deliver on its promise to the people. Related: The FAA’s troubles are more serious than you know. The near misses at airports have been telling us something. (From January)

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Passenger jet had to abort takeoff to avoid runway collision at New York’s LaGuardia Airport

When a passenger jet roaring down the runway toward takeoff at New York’s LaGuardia Airport had to slam on the brakes earlier this month because another plane was still on the runway, Renee Hoffer and all the other passengers were thrown forward in their seats.

https://apnews.com/article/laguardia-airport-close-call-faa-ntsb-821fcc0a18d5da17b832b2e17af765c0?

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Southwest Airlines will require chargers be kept out while in use because of battery fire concerns

Passengers on Southwest Airlines flights will soon be required to keep their portable chargers in plain sight while using them because of concerns about the growing number of lithium-ion battery fires in a new policy that other airlines may adopt.

https://apnews.com/article/airplanes-lithium-ion-batteries-fire-southwest-hazard-736e74e55a6467b0b12e3938653de169?

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Multiple people on private plane that crashed into San Diego neighborhood are dead, authorities say

A private jet crashed into military housing in San Diego during foggy weather early Thursday, igniting cars parked along a suburban neighborhood block and killing multiple people on board the plane, authorities said. Read More.

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United is narrowing its check-in window for US flights. Here’s how it compares to other airlines

NEW YORK (AP) — Stragglers beware: U.S. travelers flying with United Airlines will have to check in to domestic flights a little earlier starting next week. That is, if they’re customers only taking carry-on bags.

https://apnews.com/article/united-airlines-check-policy-june-3-1b157b91fed1687b300b3cab1181a190?

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United jet turns wrong way after takeoff at SFO, nearly collides with SkyWest plane

Two commercial jets departing San Francisco International Airport on parallel runways came unusually close to colliding this month, prompting a federal investigation into the incident.

https://local.newsbreak.com/san-francisco-ca/4031308935148-united-jet-turns-wrong-way-after-takeoff-at-sfo-nearly-collides-with-skywest-plane?

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NTSB finds fuel leak and improperly installed parts in the engine of an airliner that caught fire

A fuel leak and several improperly installed parts were found inside the engine of an American Airlines plane that caught fire after the plane landed in Denver in March, according to a report released Thursday.

https://apnews.com/article/denver-plane-fire-engine-ntsb-american-airlines-2fcd4f9c00b4f2162545def57767950c?

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NTSB urges quick fix on Boeing plane engines to prevent smoke from filling cabin after a bird strike

Safety experts recommended Wednesday that the engines on Boeing’s troubled 737 Max airplanes be modified quickly to prevent smoke from filling the cockpit or cabin after a safety feature is activated following a bird strike.

https://apnews.com/article/ntsb-southwest-boeing-737-max-smoke-airbus-e283a40c3ac5792b918aa8619af8a4a9?

The cost of conflict

Wars in the Middle East and Ukraine are causing significant disruptions to routine air travel. Aviation experts say it's costing commercial airlines time and money as they reroute or cancel flights.

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Air traffic controllers in Florida briefly lost radar after fiber optic line was cut

Air traffic controllers in Florida briefly lost their radar Friday after a fiber optic line was cut, but the outage didn’t lead to disruptions like what happened after similar outages around the Newark, New Jersey, airport this spring.

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2025/06/20/florida-radar-lost-fiber-optic-line-cut/?

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Systemic failures led to a door plug flying off a Boeing 737 Max, NTSB says

National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy said Tuesday that the heroic actions of the crew aboard Alaska Airlines flight 1282 ensured everyone survived the incident last year when a door plug panel flew off the plane shortly after takeoff. An NTSB investigation found that bolts securing the door plug panel were removed and never replaced during a repair. Read More.

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Spirit Airlines seeks to stop JetBlue-United partnership

Spirit Airlines is asking the U.S. Department of Transportation to block a proposed partnership between JetBlue and United Airlines, calling it "anticompetitive."

https://www.axios.com/2025/06/25/spirit-jetblue-united-airlines?

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? Best airport ranking

Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios Portland has the best airport in the U.S., according to a Washington Post ranking (gift link). The Post gathered data on the 450-plus U.S. airports with at least 1,000 passenger departures. The analysis considered such factors as ease of travel to the airport on public transit and by car ... ease of navigation inside ... reviews of restaurant and shopping ... and share of on-time arrivals. ✈️ The top 10: PDX: Portland International Airport LGB: Long Beach (Calif.) Airport DCA: Ronald Reagan International Airport MSP: Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport PAE: Seattle Paine Field International Airport PVD: Rhode Island T.F. Green International Airport ABQ: Albuquerque International Airport IND: Indianapolis International Airport SLC: Salt Lake City International Airport DTW: Detroit Metro Airport See the full list.

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Sky-high pressure

On a sprawling campus in Oklahoma City, thousands of students learn how to take command of the nation’s skies. The FAA Academy teaches air traffic controllers to keep passengers safe while planes take off, land and cruise at 30,000 feet.

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Big wallets, little legroom. Despite historically volatile margins, the airline industry at large is currently growing more profitable. That’s fallen to consumers: The average price of an airline ticket is up more than 25 percent in the last two years, far outpacing inflation — and representing the largest jump since 1989. While fares are rising, air travel has gotten ever more enshittified (excuse our language): Delays and cancellations are growing, as are overbookings, and costly bag fees — but legroom certainly isn’t. 

• Meanwhile, promotional perks seem like a thing of the past, and this year, Southwest dropped its iconic free checked bag policy and added an expiration date to flight credits.

Delta leads the way. As if treating passengers like “self-loading human cargo” isn’t enough, Delta Air Lines announced last week that it would expand its contract with Fetcherr, a dynamic pricing consulting firm — aiming to deploy their technology across 20 percent of its domestic network by the end of 2025. Delta’s president told investors that the AI-powered dynamic pricing represented “a full reengineering of how we price, and how we will be pricing in the future.” 

• As America’s largest and oldest airline, Delta has historically set industry standards. In 2023, when Delta announced it would now base its rewards program on the number of miles a passenger flies to the amount spent on tickets, other airlines quickly followed suit.
• In response to Delta’s announcement this week, Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) called it “predatory pricing” and promised, “I won’t let them get away with this.”

Reporting contributed by Lucy Dean Stockton

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Alaska Airlines resumes flights after equipment failure at a data center grounds all its planes

Alaska Airlines has resumed flights after the failure of a critical piece of hardware forced the airline to ground all its planes for approximately three hours, but the effects will linger into Monday, the company announced.

https://apnews.com/article/alaska-airlines-flights-grounded-f54e7fd57aee5c02270e4c5a33c1eb4d?

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✈️ Southwest's huge change starts soon

Illustration: Gabriella Turrisi/Axios Southwest Airlines passengers can start buying assigned seats next week for flights in January and beyond, Axios' Jason Lalljee reports. The airline's signature boarding process will be replaced by a system more like those of other airlines. 8️⃣ There will be eight boarding groups based on seat selection and loyalty status, among other factors. ? "Assigned seating unlocks new opportunities for our customers ... and removes the uncertainty of not knowing where they will sit in the cabin," Tony Roach, Southwest's executive vice president customer & brand, said in a statement. ? It's a big change from Southwest's trademark open-seating system. The shift — plus the end of free checked bags for all passengers — leaves little to distinguish Southwest from higher-end or truly budget airlines. Read the announcement.

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Air traffic controllers didn't warn a B-52 bomber crew about a nearby airliner, the Air Force says

Air traffic controllers at a small North Dakota airport didn’t inform an Air Force bomber’s crew that a commercial airliner was flying in the same area, the military said, shedding light on the nation’s latest air safety scare. Read More.

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DC Plane Crash Hearing

Hearings began yesterday in the federal probe into January’s fatal midair collision of an American Airlines jet and an Army Black Hawk in Washington, DC. Sixty-seven people were killed in the plane crash—the US' deadliest since November 2001.   The National Transportation Safety Board opened hearings with an animation showing the aircrafts' flight path before they crashed over Reagan National Airport (watch here, warning—sensitive). The Black Hawk’s barometric altimeter, built in the 1970s, misread the helicopter’s altitude by 80 to 100 feet, ultimately flying above the 200 feet altitude limit. Army pilots reportedly also missed air traffic control instructions to pass behind the jet.    A March investigation flagged concerns over small separation distances between helicopters and planes in Reagan’s airspace, citing 85 near misses between October 2021 and December 2024. Documents revealed yesterday indicated air traffic controllers had sought to change the helicopter route, but ultimately abandoned the effort.