Newark Airport Hit With Yet Another Communications Outage

Air traffic controllers managing traffic into and out of Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey experienced a communications outage Monday morning for the fourth time since late April.

During the comparatively brief two-second outage, controllers at a facility in Philadelphia were unable to communicate with the aircraft they were responsible for guiding to and from Newark.

“Operations are normal after Philadelphia TRACON Area C lost radio frequencies for approximately two seconds around 11:35 a.m. local time on Monday, May 19,” The FAA said in a statement. “All aircraft remained safely separated. The FAA is investigating.”

The same facility was hit by similar outages on April 28, May 11 and May 9, but unlike Monday’s incident, those outages stretched to a minute and a half.

The FAA is operating without a permanent head after the previous administrator, Mike Whitaker, stepped down on Inauguration Day under pressure from Elon Musk.

In February, the Trump administration fired around 400 FAA employees en masse at the urging of billionaire Trump ally Musk’s purported government cost-saving initiative, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

The cuts were made even as the nation faces a severe shortage of air traffic controllers.

According to CNN, the Philadelphia TRACON facility had three controllers on the clock last Monday night. When fully staffed during the busiest part of the day, the 24/7 facility is supposed to have 14, which it’s been unable to satisfy.