Newark ATC Has Multiple Full Radar & Radio Outages, Causing Chaos

In recent days, we’ve heard about problems at Newark International Airport (EWR), whereby flights are experiencing major delays, largely attributed to air traffic control issues. The situation is so bad that United has even slashed nearly 10% of its schedule at the airport for the foreseeable future, in order to minimize operational impacts.

There’s now an interesting update, as we’re learning more about how air traffic controllers at the airport and in the surrounding airspace suffered full equipment outages, whereby they lost radar and radio contact with pilots. This is one of the main events that triggered the issues that we’ve seen in recent days.

Newark ATC loses contact with pilots multiple times

We’re now learning more details about an event that happened on April 28, 2025, at Newark. Air traffic controllers responsible for flights to and from Newark (partly based in the Philadelphia TRACON) “temporarily lost radar and communications with the aircraft under their control, unable to see, hear, or talk to them,” according to the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA). It’s believed that the full outage lasted for around 90 seconds, but it took a lot longer than that to recover.

VASAviation has an excellent video with air traffic control audio from one of these incidents. It’s really shocking to hear this audio, with pilots in some of the busiest airspace in the world suddenly being on their own. Huge kudos to the controllers and the pilots for how professionally they handled this situation.

What’s wild is that the above incident isn’t even the first time that this has happened. According to air traffic controllers, this has happened eight or nine times in recent months.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) even acknowledges that several controllers “have taken time off to recover from the stress of multiple recent outages,” further exacerbating the controller shortage. NATCA clarified that workers have been taking time off work under the Federal Employees’ Compensation Act, which “covers all federal employees that are physically injured or experience a traumatic event on the job.”

The FAA also states that “our antiquated air traffic control system is affecting our workforce,” and that they are “working to ensure the current telecommunications equipment is more reliable in the New York area by establishing a more resilient and redundant configuration with the local exchange carriers.”

FAA pledges to upgrade technology going forward

While there’s a lot of work to be done for Newark Airport to be fully functional and reliable again, the FAA has shared the steps that it’s taking to at least prevent these full outages in the future. The FAA acknowledges that airport issues stem from both airport runway construction, as well as staffing and technology issues.

When it comes to technology issues, the FAA claims to be taking immediate steps to improve the reliability of operations, including accelerating technological and logistical improvements, and increasing air traffic controller staffing.

The FAA explains that the system that processes radar data for Newark is based in New York, and is called STARS. Telecommunications lines feed this data from New York to the Philadelphia TRACON, where controllers handle Newark arrivals and departures. So the following actions are being taken:

• Adding three new, high bandwidth telecommunications connections between the New York-based STARS and the Philadelphia TRACON, which will provide more speed, reliability, and redundancy
• Replacing copper telecommunications connections with updated fiberoptic technology that also have greater bandwidth and speed
• Deploying a temporary backup system to the Philadelphia TRACON that will provide redundancy during the switch to a more reliable fiberoptic network
• Establishing a STARS hub at the Philadelphia TRACON so that the facility does not depend on a telecommunications feed from the New York STARS hub

Now, it remains to be seen with what timeline all of this happens, and how many more outages we see before this is fixed. So I guess if you’re traveling or from Newark, you don’t just have to worry about a potential delay, but also about the plane you’re on losing contact with controllers.

Bottom line

We’re learning more details about the recent incident that caused some of the mess we’re currently seeing at Newark Airport. Air traffic controllers reportedly lost their radars and radios for around 90 seconds, and that isn’t even the first time we’ve seen something like that in recent times.

In addition to the general staffing shortage, this has also caused some controllers to reportedly take time off, making the situation even worse. The FAA has pledged to upgrade the technology to prevent similar situations in the future, though we’ll see how quickly that all happens.

What do you make of this Newark ATC failure?