Ten days after an equipment malfunction left about a dozen planes flying blind for 90 seconds in the crowded skies over New Jersey, worried pilots and air traffic controllers are imploring the Federal Aviation Administration to fix the system's aging infrastructure.
The "shell-shocked" controllers who guide planes in and out of Newark Liberty International Airport work in constant fear of radar systems' going down or losing radio contact with pilots as they're approaching one of the busiest airports in the country, a recently retired controller told NBC News.
Both of those failures happened at once on April 28.
“It’s everybody’s worst nightmare,” said Michael Donahue, who worked at Philadelphia International Airport for two decades and who, up until February, shared space with the controllers who handled the flights into Newark. “Every time, the FAA goes back and says this won’t happen again. It keeps happening.”
Donahue, 53, said there were at least half-a-dozen times when the radar they used to track planes suddenly stopped working. He said they lost radio contact with pilots on almost a weekly basis.
“People would come out of the room screaming, ‘We’ve lost the frequencies!’” Donahue said. “That’s almost just as scary, because you could see two planes going towards each other and not be able to do anything.”
Last year, the FAA moved controllers who are responsible for aircraft arriving and departing from Newark from a facility on Long Island, New York, to the one in Philadelphia. The move was intended to reduce the workload of controllers at the Long Island facility who were also handling traffic for New York City’s other major airports.
But there’s been one problem after another since the shift, Donahue said.
“As soon as they got here, they were having frequency issues, and one day they lost the radar completely,” Donahue said. “It happened again and again and again.”
“They’re at stress level 10 at the Newark approach because every time they go in, they’re like, am I gonna lose the radar today? Am I gonna lose the frequencies?” he said. “I think they’re just at their breaking point.”
'A frail system'
The technology breakdown at Philadelphia's Terminal Radar Approach Control facility, or TRACON, can put more pressure on pilots to avoid catastrophe.
Jason Ambrosi, president of the 79,000-member Air Line Pilots Association, echoed calls for the FAA to fix outdated technology and staffing shortages at the facilities.
“For pilots who navigate these skies daily, our message is unequivocal: Now is the time for immediate, decisive action with steadfast commitment to safeguard and enhance aviation’s safety and efficiency,” Ambrosi said in a statement.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy insisted Monday there was never any danger of planes colliding during the brief communications breakdown last week.
“Were planes going to crash? No. They have communication devices,” Duffy said on Fox News. “They can see other air traffic.”
Ambrosi said pilots are highly trained to anticipate potential issues and communicate with crew members and others in the system to share "experiences for awareness and action."
And United Airlines, a major carrier at Newark airport, insisted its pilots train for midair communication breakdowns with air traffic controllers. CEO Scott Kirby reassured employees in an email Wednesday that its pilots have thousands of hours of flight experience, regularly undergo simulator training and have procedures to re-establish communication if they lose radio contact with controllers.
Because of those protocols, it’s not likely that planes left in the dark will crash, said Benjie Coleman, a former National Transportation Safety Board investigator and FAA inspector.
“The professional pilots and the folks flying the airlines these days have procedures for everything, including communication failures and radar failures,” said Coleman, who is also a pilot. “It’s not a good situation, but it’s not a lethal situation.”
Still, there's some risk whenever a plane loses contact with air traffic controllers on the ground. "The longer that a radar and radio outage lasts, the longer the exposure to an increased risk of a collision," Jeff Guzzetti, a retired air safety investigator for the NTSB and the FAA, said in an email.
Each air traffic control facility has its own “operational emergency plan” for dealing with cataclysmic events like power outages, he said.
“These systems have redundancies, but sometimes a failure can be so large, or occur to basic infrastructure, that the redundancies are eliminated,” Guzzetti said.
Donahue, the recently retired Philadelphia controller, said “it seems like there’s no redundancies in Philadelphia.”
If the radar system goes out, Donahue said, there’s a button to press, called “emergency service,” which backs up the radar and immediately provides a backup scope that displays all the planes, their altitudes and their speeds.
But of late, when the team in Philadelphia that handles Newark has been hitting the backup button, he said, “it’s blank, just like the regular screen.”
“So at that point, they have nothing to work with,” he said. “I don’t know why they haven’t fixed it. They’ve been shouting from the rooftop to fix it.”
The Newark airspace controllers lost all contact with pilots last week after a failure of the copper wiring that transmits radar data from New York to Philadelphia TRACON, the FAA said.
“It’s a sign that we have a frail system in place, and it has to be fixed,” Duffy said.
Since then, the FAA has announced plans to replace copper telecommunications connections with updated fiber-optic technology with greater bandwidth and speed.
To ease the flight delays at Newark, it said, the FAA hopes to bring in more controllers, including some controller trainees, to replace the five who have gone on trauma leave since the April 28 incident. The agency also plans to use a temporary backup radar system in Philadelphia to enable planes to get in and out of Newark faster.
A current Newark airspace controller who asked not to be identified told NBC News on Tuesday that similar technological breakdowns have happened at least two other times since August and that controllers have lost radio contact with pilots flying into Newark at least eight or nine times in recent months.
The controller said the team that handles Newark air traffic is working stressful 10-hour days, six days a week, with unreliable equipment.
“The FAA knew about this situation for years, and they waited too long to act,” the controller said.
