The Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has declared that flying out of Newark Airport remains entirely safe, despite a recent blackout that resulted in flights being grounded for almost an hour in New Jersey.
Yet, Duffy did acknowledge that there is a need to reduce the number of flights departing from Newark Liberty International Airport following a series of unsettling incidents that have made air travelers cautious.
President Donald Trump’s head of the Department of Transportation said on Sunday morning that he continues to ‘fly out of Newark all the time.’
On the same day, the Federal Aviation Administration, responsible for overseeing air travel within the U.S., imposed a ground stop on all flights at Newark due to a malfunction in the air traffic control system.
The 45-minute ground stop comes after two separate 90-second-long radar and radio outages in the span of two weeks on April 28 and May 9 at Newark’s airport.
Now, just two days after the radar outage on Friday, Newark was forced to implement a ground stop on Mother’s day.
As of Friday at 4:00 p.m., there were 140 flights canceled and another 401 delayed after the latest radar outage, according to Flightaware.
When air traffic controllers’ radar screens went dark for a minute-and-a-half early Friday morning it nearly became a midair disaster – but luckily it was at 3:55 a.m. when air travel is very light.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) released a statement to X revealing the blackout was caused by a ‘telecommunications outage’ at Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) Area C.
Still, Duffy is optimistic about air travel to and from the New Jersey airport despite increasing incidents.
‘Is it safe to fly in and out of Newark airport right now?’ NBC Meet the Press host Kristen Welker asked the Transportation Secretary.
He assured Americans: ‘It is.’
‘I fly out of Newark all the time. My family flies out of Newark,’ Duffy added. ‘And just when we saw these two incidents… when we have issues, there are policies and procedures in place for controllers and for pilots. They know what to do. It is not ideal, by any stretch.’
‘We have to fix it, though. This is an American issue, and it’s going to be an American congressional priority, I think, in this coming year, to get us the money to do the three or four-year build that it’s going to take to get this completed,’ he said.
Equipment is outdated and Duffy says more money needs to be allotted to do updates at airports and air traffic control towers.
‘I’m concerned about the whole airspace, right?’ he said in his Sunday morning interview with NBC News. ‘The equipment that we use, much of it we can’t buy parts for new. We have to go on eBay and buy parts if one part goes down. You’re dealing with really old equipment. We’re dealing with copper wires, not fiber, not high-speed fiber. And so this is concerning.’
‘Is it safe? Yes, we have redundancies, multiple redundancies in place to keep you safe when you fly,’ Duffy insisted. ‘But we should also recognize we’re seeing stress on an old network, and it’s time to fix it.’
Welker asked Duffy if there is a need to ‘scale back’ flights coming in and out of the Newark airport while problems are addressed and fixes implemented.
‘One hundred percent,’ the DOT head said. ‘So we actually have brought down the number of airplanes that come in and leave Newark because, listen, our mission is safety.’
He admitted that this will lead to a log jam of travelers going into and out of the airport responsible for a lot of travel to America’s biggest city – New York.
‘I hate delays. I hate cancellations. And I hate families who come with little kids that are sitting there for four hours. I’ve done that myself on occasion. It’s hard,’ Duffy said. ‘But I want you to get to where you’re traveling. And if that means slowing down flights into Newark, we slow them down to make sure we can do it safely.’
