The Federal Aviation Administration will meet with airline representatives Wednesday, seeking to cut flights going into and out of Newark Liberty International Airport amid mounting delays, hundreds of cancellations and growing frustration among passengers.
The so-called “delay reduction” task force will consider capping the total number of arrivals and departures per hour to ease pressure on the airport.
“The goal is to have a manageable number of flights land at Newark,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy explained at a press briefing on Monday of the meeting in Washington. “Families shouldn’t have to wait four or five hours for a flight that never takes off. By lowering the number of flights, we can ensure the ones that are kept, they do actually take off and they do actually land.”
At issue is ongoing construction work at the airport, along with repeated failures of the region’s aging air traffic control systems and a shortage of flight controllers needed to guide aircraft in and out.
Working short-staffed — while confronting mounting technical problems with an old network of radars and communications equipment that seem at times to be held together with duct tape and frayed wire — controllers handling traffic into Newark have had to deal with at least three radio and radar blackouts since April. That left them unable to talk to pilots or “see” planes on radar as they were guiding them through the congested airspace of the metropolitan area.
Those problems came to a head after controllers at New York’s Terminal Radar Approach Control center, known as TRACON, which manages air traffic control in the airspace surrounding Newark Liberty, were moved to Philadelphia last year in an attempt to improve staffing. Instead, it made it worse. Some quit rather than relocate their lives.
At the same time, the data connections between the radar processing center in New York and the Philadelphia facility turned out to be less than robust and without any backup, causing the communications outages.
Causing further havoc has been the loss of one of the two main runways at Newark Liberty, known by its code of EWR, which is undergoing repaving and reconstruction that will not be completed until June. This has meant the airport can no longer simultaneously dispatch and receive aircraft on its two longest runways.
The issues have played out like the perfect storm, causing flights to be cancelled or delayed. That, in turn, has caused ripple effects at airports across the country, with ground stops and missed connections.
The FAA has been slowing arrivals and departures out of Newark Liberty since the runway construction began.
In addition, United Airlines, which is the largest carrier at the busy airport, earlier this month announced it would cut nearly three dozen round-trip flights from its daily schedule in and out of Newark Liberty, citing the airport’s continuing air traffic control staffing issue, as well as the technological problems that have snarled airport operations.
United CEO Scott Kirby earlier this month called for the FAA to issue “slots” for Newark — basically a reservation system granting airlines for a specific times to either take off or land at an airport, thereby limiting the number of flights arriving or departing at the same time.
“Every other large capacity constrained airport in the world uses slots to make sure that the number of scheduled flights in any given hour does not exceed the airport’s maximum capacity,” said Kirby in a letter to employees. “EWR is the only large airport in the world that no longer has this basic common-sense rule.”
The FAA, he pointed out, de-slotted Newark Liberty in 2016.
While Kirby said United tried to address the airport’s constraints, citing its cutting of 35 flights to relieve pressure on Newark, “other airlines simply backfill our flying when we reduce our schedule.”
He called for the airport to be limited to 48 flights an hour while one of its main runways is under construction.
The airport right now is running between 24 and 28 arrivals and the same departures an hour, according to Duffy.
In an FAA notice file in advance of Wednesday’s meeting with airline representatives, the agency said it will propose to cap traffic at that number.
The agency called for an hourly arrival rate of no more than 28 operations, with a corresponding departure rate of 28 operations, or a total of no more than 56 arrivals and departures until the work on Runway 4L/22R is completed in June.
Through the end of the summer, the FAA proposed to bump up those numbers to 34 arrivals and 34 departures per hour, which it said would reduce overscheduling, flight delays, and cancellations.
Acting FAA Administrator Chris Rocheleau said what comes out of the meeting with air carriers on Wednesday will be critical “to make sure that the travel season this summer is good for the American traveling public.”
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