An air traffic controller on duty during a 90-second communications blackout at Newark International Airport earlier this month says that if immediate changes aren’t made in one of the busiest airports in the country, “people will pay with their lives.”
The 39-year-old New York native, a 16-year veteran controller in one of the most chaotic airspaces in the world, made the statements this week in an anonymously written article published in the British news outlet The Times.
The incident happened just before 4 a.m. May 9 while she was the only controller serving the New Jersey airport and it’s not even the first time.
The same tower, which runs out of Philadelphia, experienced a communications outage on April 28 as well, and in both cases, the backup systems failed to immediately keep radar and communications with pilots online.
During the May 9-minute-and-a-half blackout, she wrote that she could no longer see the dozens of planes that had just been dotting her radar seconds earlier, giving her no way to track the four commercial airline pilots she had just been guiding.
“Being at the control without any of our signals is like trying to dodge mines without a mine detector,” she said.
Once the radar frequencies returned, she was able to recover contact with the planes, but no one knew if communications would suddenly go dark again.
They did in fact go dark again, but not until May 11 and, fortunately, in that case, the backup systems worked immediately.
The 39-year-old controller was so shaken from the incident that she, like many of her colleagues at Newark, was put on stress-trauma leave, meaning there are now even fewer experienced controllers working the busy corridor.
“Do I think it’s safe to fly from or to the airport? Let me put it like this: I deliberately avoid my own airport when booking flights, even if the alternatives are more expensive and less convenient,” she wrote. “If Newark’s air traffic control problems don’t get fixed, I believe it’s only a matter of time before we have a fatal crash between two planes.”
In response to the outages, officials at the Federal Aviation Administration acknowledged that the “system is outdated and showing its age.”
They added that when equipment failures occur, the FAA makes sure to slow traffic down at the airport for greater safety.
