Radar failure (and a big scare): What happened in Newark?

Newark airport has once again been hit by a serious radar failure, similar to the one that occurred the previous week, plunging several air traffic controllers into a state of severe distress and causing work stoppages, delays and disruption at Newark airport.

Breaking News: An air traffic control facility at Newark Airport suffered another radar outage, the latest disruption at one of the nation’s busiest airports.

— The New York Times (@nytimes.com) 2025-05-09T16:04:55.157Z

More worryingly, this new failure could have led to incidents with potentially catastrophic consequences for aircraft operating in the vicinity of the airport.

According to the New York Times, this second incident occurred on Thursday night at around 4 a.m., when the radar, as on the previous occasion, stopped working completely for around 90 seconds.

According to the FAA, cited by ABC News, the airport was the victim of a “telecommunications failure that affected communications and radar display in Zone C of the Philadelphia TRACON control center”.

This second incident forced the FAA to temporarily suspend all departures to the airport, as controllers were no longer able to communicate with aircraft during the short duration of the outage.

Transport Secretary Sean Duffy announced this week the deployment of a new “state-of-the-art” air traffic control system to replace the current infrastructure, described as “obsolete”. But its commissioning is not expected for another three to four years, raising serious concerns among air traffic controllers, especially as the Trump administration, backed by Elon Musk and the DOGE movement, has imposed major budget cuts on the FAA.

These incidents rekindle deep concerns about aviation safety in the United States, while several major disasters have marked the start of Trump’s term in office. Among them: the deadly collision on January 29 between a PSA Airlines regional jet and a military helicopter over the Potomac, which killed 67 people; the crash of a medical jet in Philadelphia on January 31, resulting in eight deaths; the crash of a Bering Air flight in Alaska on February 6, with ten fatalities; and the collision on the tarmac at Scottsdale airport, Arizona, on February 10, which left one person dead.

This content was created with the help of AI.