The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in the United States has reported a second radar outage for the airport in Newark, New Jersey, in less than two weeks.
The incident raises continuing questions about the state of air traffic control in the US, increasing the pressure on the administration of President Donald Trump to address aviation safety.
On Friday, the FAA reported that, around 3: 55am local time (07: 55 GMT), a facility in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, lost its telecommunications signal for about 90 seconds, preventing it from monitoring communications and radar signals for the Newark Liberty International Airport.
A recording reviewed by the news agency Reuters captured some of the frustration amid the outage.
“FedEx 1989, I’m going to hand you off here. Our scopes just went black again,” a controller told the pilot for a shipping flight.
“If you care about this, contact your airline and try to get some pressure for them to fix this stuff.”
This was the second time a 90-second outage was reported for Newark, a major air terminal that serves metropolitan areas like New York City.
On April 28, a similar incident occurred, resulting in hundreds of delays and dozens of diverted flights. Five air-traffic controllers also went on leave after the incident, using a federal law that allows them to take time off after traumatic incidents.
In the wake of Friday’s incident, The Associated Press reported that delays and cancellations at Newark were also up, citing statistics from the website FlightAware.com.
The White House briefly addressed the second outage at its daily news briefing with journalists, pledging upgrades in the coming months.
“There was a glitch in the system this morning, especially at Newark airport,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters.
“That glitch was caused by the same telecoms and software issues that were raised last week. Everything went back online after the brief outage, and there was no operational impact.”
Leavitt added that the FAA and the Department of Transportation would “address this technical issue tonight to prevent further outages”.
While every second matters in aviation, industry insiders say air traffic controllers and pilots have training to handle outages, to min