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See How a Communications Outage Affected Flights at Newark Airport

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See How a Communications Outage Affected Flights at Newark Airport

On April 28, shortly before 1:30 p.m., air traffic controllers working the airspace around Newark Liberty International Airport lost communications with planes for roughly 30 seconds.

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Source: Flightradar24

Note: The map shows passenger flights scheduled to land at Newark International Airport or those that had already departed. Flights on the ground are not shown. Plane symbols are not shown to scale.

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The New York Times

Air traffic data shows that after the outage, multiple planes began circling in the air, awaiting a safe opportunity to land. Starting about 15 minutes after the outage, no passenger planes departed or landed at the airport for at least another hour and a half. Dozens of flights were diverted that afternoon, including to Allentown and Philadelphia.

The brief but serious outage led to immediate disruptions that have continued in the 10 days since. There were hundreds of major delays and cancellations at Newark that day and thousands more through May 5.

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More cancellations and major delays at Newark since April 28

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Source: Flightradar24

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Note: Flights were considered on time if they arrived or departed at Newark within 15 minutes of their scheduled time. Minor delays are delays of 15 minutes to 90 minutes; major delays are delays longer than 90 minutes. Only data for passenger flights is shown.

By The New York Times

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Under normal staffing guidelines, there should have been 10 people on duty to work the Newark airspace; during the time of the outage, only four controllers were on duty. Several of the controllers working that day were left with extreme anxiety and took federally permitted leave that further exacerbated lower staffing levels in the subsequent days.

Poor weather conditions have also contributed to flight delays in the days since the episode. Adding to the chaos, the airport’s longest runway has been shut down since April 15 for construction, increasing congestion at the two remaining runways.

Cancellations at Newark have reached into the hundreds on some days. During the week of April 28, the airport had roughly 960 arrivals and departures scheduled each day, according to FlightAware, a company that tracks flight information.

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Canceled flights at Newark compared with other New York-area airports

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Source: Flightradar24

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By The New York Times

LaGuardia Airport and Kennedy International Airport also saw a slight, though not as severe, uptick during that same week. LaGuardia had an average of 1,000 daily flights scheduled, similar to Newark’s average; Kennedy had over 1,200.

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Video: We Analyzed the Deadly Crash at LaGuardia

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Video: We Analyzed the Deadly Crash at LaGuardia

new video loaded: We Analyzed the Deadly Crash at LaGuardia

Our graphics reporter Lazaro Gamio breaks down the second-by-second analysis leading up to the deadly plane crash at LaGuardia Airport.

By Lazaro Gamio, Coleman Lowndes and James Surdam

March 27, 2026

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Video: LaGuardia Crash Survivors Recount Ordeal

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Video: LaGuardia Crash Survivors Recount Ordeal

“I just thought, please don’t let this be how my life ends. I’m not ready to die. When we landed, it was a very rough landing. Like we landed and the plane jolted back up, and that caught a lot of passengers off guard. Everyone kind of like, ‘What’s going on?’ And then you hear the pilot braking, and it was like just this grinding sound.” “Everybody was shocked everywhere. There was — there’s people screaming. The plane just veered off course. I mean, it was just — it all happened so quickly, but it all felt just like a very dire situation.” “Oh, God. Oh my goodness. That’s crazy.” “People were bleeding from their nose, cuts and scrapes. I saw black eyes, all different types of facial contusions, bruising and bleeding. I was sitting by the exit door, and I opened the exit door. There was a sense of camaraderie amongst the survivors. Nobody was pushing, shoving, ‘I got to get out first.’” “The plane actually tipped back as we were leaving, as people were getting off the plane. That was when the nose kind of fell off the front of the plane, and the whole plane kind of went up to what we’d seen in all the pictures of the plane’s nose in the air.” And there was no slide when we got out. A lot of us were jumping off of the airplane wing to get down. And when I got out and I saw that the front of the plane, how destroyed it was, I just was — I was in shock.” “It was only really when I was outside of the plane, looking back at the plane, and I had seen what had happened to the cockpit, and then just like this sense of dread overcame me, where I was just like, wow, a lot of people might have just been pretty badly hurt.” “I’m grateful to the pilots who were so courageous and brave, and acted swiftly, and they saved our lives. And if it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t be able to come home to my family. I’m forever indebted to them. They’re my heroes.”

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Video: Passenger Jet and Fire Truck Crash at LaGuardia Airport, Leaving 2 Dead

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Video: Passenger Jet and Fire Truck Crash at LaGuardia Airport, Leaving 2 Dead

new video loaded: Passenger Jet and Fire Truck Crash at LaGuardia Airport, Leaving 2 Dead

The two pilots of a Air Canada Express jet were killed after a collision with a Port Authority fire truck on Sunday at LaGuardia Airport in New York.

By Axel Boada and Monika Cvorak

March 23, 2026

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