America's air traffic control problem

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🗓️ 7 May 2025

⏱️ 11 minutes

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Summary

Newark Liberty International Airport has been a mess the past week, with hundreds of flights cancelled and hundreds more delayed. It was triggered in part by an incident on April 28, when air traffic controllers for the airport experienced a radar and communications blackout. They were unable to reach approaching planes.

There were no accidents, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy later told reporters that the outage lasted for 30 seconds.

After that incident, several air traffic controllers took time off to deal with the stress and trauma. That, on top of bad weather, a runway that's closed for repair and an already short-staffed air traffic controller corps, led to a lot of disruption.

David Grizzle, the former chief operating officer and head of air traffic control for the Federal Aviation Administration, says what happened at Newark isn't surprising, given decades-old staffing and technology issues. He explains what it would take to fix air traffic control in the U.S.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hopefully you haven't had to fly out of Newark Airport in the past week. If you have, you know it's been a mess.
0:06.9	Hundreds of flights canceled, hundreds more delayed. All this kicked off in part because of what happened on April 28th.
0:15.2	Air traffic control lost all radar and communications with planes. The website LiveATC.net captured the harrowing
0:22.8	silence. As planes tried to reach the controllers, it was archived by Fox Business.
0:31.9	Approached you there.
0:34.6	Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy later told the press that the communications blackout lasted 30 seconds.
0:41.0	There were no accidents, but several air traffic controllers took time off to deal with the stress and trauma of that experience.
0:48.3	Add to that, bad weather, a runway that's closed for repair, and an already short-staffed air traffic controller
0:54.8	core, and you get a whole lot of delays. Now, this problem didn't come out of nowhere.
1:01.4	Here's United CEO Scott Kirby on NPR in December. For the whole month in November,
1:05.8	we had over half a million customers that were delayed because of air traffic control
1:09.7	shortfalls in Newark alone.
1:12.5	And it's not just Newark. The air traffic controller shortage is nationwide. And the technical
1:17.6	systems that many controllers use are decades old. Here's Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth of
1:23.1	Illinois at a Senate hearing focused on the issue back in 2023. Our nation is experiencing an aviation safety crisis.
1:30.9	Mayor and Mrs. are happening way too frequently, and I refuse to be complacent in waiting
1:35.4	to act until the next runway incursion becomes a fatal collision.
1:39.1	Secretary Duffy told reporters on Tuesday, he has a plan to address this, but it's not an instant fix.
1:45.0	The question is, can I do something more quickly to train controllers?
1:48.2	And the answer is no.
1:49.5	This all takes time.
1:51.3	You can't snap your fingers and have really complicated air spaces, you know, where I can
	...

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