Almost 80 flights have been cancelled and more than 60 delayed at Newark airport after yet another equipment outage brought more chaos to the the NYC-area hub.
A 45-minute ground stop was ordered on Sunday morning by the FAA following the outage at Newark’s ATC facility, officials told WABC.Then, a short time later a different outage hit Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport the busiest in the country.
“Runway equipment issues” resulted in delays and ground stops for nearly all flights arriving at Atlanta.
“An equipment outage at ATL’s Air Traffic Control Tower is currently causing delays for inbound and outbound aircraft. For further details please contact the FAA. In the meantime, we encourage passengers to contact their respective airlines and visit ATL.com for further information on their individual travel itineraries,” an FAA spokesperson told 11Alive.
At Newark, the problem was yet again the Philadelphia-based air traffic control center that controls the airport.
“There was a telecommunications issue at Philadelphia TRACON Area C, which guides aircraft in and out of Newark Liberty International Airport airspace,” the FAA said in a statement. “The FAA briefly slowed aircraft in and out of the airport while we ensured redundancies were working as designed.”
No flights were diverted during Sunday’s outage as of 11 a.m., according to flight tracking website, FlightAware.
It comes after a radar malfunction on Friday morning brought Newark to a standstill briefly on Friday morning.
The 90-second-long radar and radio outage at the TRACON facility was just days after a similar incident on April 28, which led to five air traffic controllers taking leave on trauma grounds.
Controllers are entitled to at least 45 days away from the job and must be evaluated by a doctor before they can return to work.
More than 1,000 flights were canceled in the face of the staff shortages.