The Federal Aviation Administration said on Friday that it had suffered a new breakdown in a Philadelphia establishment supervising air traffic at Newark Liberty airport, the Last in a series of equipment problems which hampered traffic and made the public alarm.
The FAA said that the telecommunications breakdown had an impact on communications and radar displays to control the terminal radar approach in Philadelphia which guides planes in and outside Newark Liberty around 3:55 a.m. on Friday and lasted approximately 90 seconds.
The WABC reported that air traffic controllers could be heard during a radio transmission by telling a Fedex plane that their screens were dark.
The latest incident highlights the aging infrastructure of the air traffic control network and one day comes after the Secretary of Transport Sean Duffy proposed to spend billions of dollars to repair it over the next three to four years.
The FAA said on Wednesday that it was taking immediate measures to resolve the current problems that have disrupted hundreds of flights to Newark since April 28, in particular United Airlines Ual.O, the largest carrier of the airport located just outside New York.
The FAA said it increases the staffing of the air traffic controller, adding three new wide -band telecommunications connections and deploying a temporary backup system to the Philadelphia Tracon during the transition to a more reliable network with fiber optic.
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Duffy said Thursday that the FAA had two redundant lines “the two are in place and work now” in Philadelphia.
The FAA did not immediately answer why the backup did not prevent Friday’s incident.
Newark was struck by the construction of the track, the FAA equipment failures and the shortages of air traffic control personnel that caused urgent calls for legislators for surveys and new funding.
Friday, Flightaware said that Newark is experiencing incoming flights on average on average more than four hours and the delays in the start of an average of an hour or more.
Duffy said that controllers on Thursday supervising the planes of the highly frequented airport lost contact with planes on April 28 for 30 to 90 seconds, an incident that raised a serious alarm.
Last year, the FAA moved control of Newark airspace in Philadelphia to tackle the staff and the traffic of the New York Congestion region.
(Report by David Shepardson; additional report by Doyinsola Oladipo and Rajesh Kumar Singh edition by Chizu Nomiyama)