US airports across the Northeast began returning to normal on Monday after a telecommunications failure disrupted air traffic operations at several major airports, causing more than 1,000 flight delays and cancellations.US transportation secretary Sean Duffy said the communications lines had been repaired and operations were gradually resuming, although passengers were still expected to face delays as airlines worked through the backlog.“The telecom lines have been repaired, and all airport operations in the Northeast are resuming,” Duffy said.
What caused the disruption
The disruption began at around 10 am after a circuit failure at the Federal Aviation Administration’s Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach Control facility knocked out radio and radar equipment used to manage aircraft around several airports.The failure affected New York’s John F Kennedy International Airport, LaGuardia Airport and Newark Liberty International Airport, as well as Philadelphia, Teterboro and Westchester County airports.The outage meant that flights headed for some of the airports could not land and were instead held at their departure points or diverted to other airports.Flightradar24 said JFK and LaGuardia were added to the list of airports where departing flights were being held because of the FAA equipment failure. Newark, Teterboro, Philadelphia and Westchester County were also affected.
Newark sees hundreds of diversions
Newark saw particularly heavy disruption. Flightradar24 said arrivals resumed at the airport later in the day after a prolonged halt.“Arrivals have just resumed at Newark. No commercial flights landed at EWR between 09:38 and 17:22 local time today,” Flightradar24 posted.By 5.30 pm local time, 107 flights had been diverted from Newark to 34 different airports, affecting 25 airlines, according to the flight-tracking service.Washington’s Dulles International Airport received 19 of those diverted flights, while JFK took 12. United Airlines, which operates a major hub at Newark, was the airline most affected, with 70 diversions.
A second failure made matters worse
The disruption was compounded when officials discovered that a newly installed fibre-optic backup system in New Jersey had also been damaged during construction work.Duffy said a fibre-optic line near an Amtrak railway line had been cut, affecting Verizon communication lines.FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said the incident exposed weaknesses in the agency’s existing infrastructure and called for changes to the network design.“The network design is terrible. And if we don’t fix the network design, we’re going to continue having these failures,” he said.The disruption came as New York prepared to host world leaders and ministers for the 81st United Nations General Assembly, adding to the importance of restoring normal airport operations.By around 6 pm, Duffy said the telecommunications lines had been repaired and airport operations across the Northeast were resuming. However, passengers were warned that delays could continue as airlines cleared the disruption’s knock-on effects.
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