From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily.

A 90-second failure of Newark Airport's air traffic safety systems, which blacked out communication to planes carrying thousands of passengers, has prompted a new level of concern in air travel.

Today, my colleague Kate Kelly explains what the problems at one of the country's biggest airports tell us about air travel safety in the United States.

It's Thursday, May 8th.

Kate Kelly, welcome to the Daily.

Thanks for having me, Rachel.

Kate, there have been a string of incidents in U.S. air travel in recent months that have really, I think, shaken consumer confidence in

flying. For example, we had the deadliest plane crash in decades in the U.S. happened in January,

in Washington, D.C. And then there have been all these reports of near misses, near collisions.

And then finally, now, most recently, we have this major failure in air traffic control systems in

Newark. We have talked on the show before about how aviation generally, the system is under a lot

of pressure in this country. But what's happening

with Newark feels like an even more of an escalation from the problems that we've discussed

before. And I think a lot of people are wondering what on Earth is going on and is it actually

less safe to fly right now? It's a really great question, Rachel, and one that

I've been asking myself and my colleagues, are we just paying more attention in the wake of the

DCA crash to issues, whether it's wing bumping or actual crashes in the national airspace,

or are there actually more occurring?

Anecdotally, it certainly feels like the latter. But what I think has really caught people's

attention are these issues at Newark Liberty International Airport, which is one of the busiest

in the national air system in the U.S. They had a major radar and

radio outage on Monday the 28th of April that led to essentially chaos for passengers and a public

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