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.

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.

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.

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.