‘I missed it because I was tired’: US air traffic control crisis exposes cracks in global aviation hub

WASHINGTON – Ms Lisa Vandever was already hours late when the pilot’s voice came over the intercom: “There are 35 planes ahead of us.”

The 62-year-old event planner from New Jersey had boarded the flight in Newark – already delayed and rescheduled – to go to California to help care for her elderly mother. Now, she sat trapped on the tarmac, one of thousands of passengers grounded after a communications blackout severed contact between pilots and air traffic controllers at Newark Liberty International Airport outside New York City on April 28.

“This doesn’t have to be happening,” Ms Vandever said. “We know these are ageing systems. This should be an emergency situation.”

The outage disrupted more than flights; it exposed a deeper crisis in America’s skies: outdated infrastructure, a shrinking workforce, and repeated failures in the systems designed to keep planes safe.

In the weeks that followed, Newark Liberty, America’s 12th busiest airport, suffered at least three more technical failures.

The ripple effects were swift: cascading delays, hundreds of cancellations, and, eventually, a 25 per cent cap on the number of domestic and international flights arriving and departing hourly from Newark.

An overburdened system

The American Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) manages the world’s largest and busiest airspace, which stretches almost 78 million sq km.

Over the last 50 years, air travel in the US has ballooned, but technology has not kept up.

The FAA attributed the outage at Newark to ageing copper wire infrastructure that simply could not handle the volume of incoming data. Unlike high-bandwidth fibre optics, copper lines are easily overwhelmed.

Compounding the issue is the continued reliance on radars from the 1970s, instead of more modern satellites.

“So much has changed in our technology, but air traffic technology has not,” said Dr Sheldon Jacobson, an aviation security expert at the University of Illinois.

In 1980, US airlines carried around 300 million passengers each year, according to Airlines for America, a trade group that represents the country’s major airlines.

By 2019, that number had more than tripled to 926 million.

The growth congested the skies. Routes once lightly travelled are now thick with traffic, and the airspace above America’s major cities has become tightly choreographed highways for thousands of jets, all relying on systems originally built for a far less crowded era.

After the system buckled for 90 seconds on April 28 at the Philadelphia Tracon (terminal radar approach control) Centre serving Newark airport,

a second outage struck on May 9,

knocking out radar and radio communications for the same duration.

Two days later, on May 11, a third failure hit Newark airspace. This time, a newly installed software patch and backup line prevented a full blackout, but the FAA halted incoming flights for 45 minutes as a precaution.

On May 14, a radio transmitter malfunction at Denver International Airport left air traffic controllers unable to communicate with pilots for about two minutes.

Slowing down to stay safe

In the aftermath of the outages, federal officials turned to the only immediate fix they had: slowing things down.

Flight caps at Newark were set at 56 take-offs and landings per hour and will remain in effect until June 15, increasing slightly to 68 through October. Before the outages, the airport handled 77 operations per hour, according to the FAA.

It was the right call, aviation experts told The Straits Times. Reducing the volume of flights lowers the risk of the system becoming overwhelmed.

“You have all these technologies that haven’t been replaced as fast as they should have. So now what is happening is you have an ageing infrastructure combined with staff shortages. That’s creating a perfect storm that’s causing a lot of headaches,” said Dr Hassan Shahidi, chief executive of the Flight Safety Foundation, an independent non-profit that provides aviation safety guidance.

“But safety is never compromised,” he said, adding that during tech failures or staff shortages, the FAA will always reduce the number of flights to ensure safe landings.

On Fox News, US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said: “Were planes going to crash? No.”

He cited other technology available to pilots, such as Global Positioning System devices on board.

“But it’s a sign that we have a frail system in place, and it has to be fixed.”

Is there a will to fix it?

Fixing the system, however, is an arduous process. Because the airspace cannot shut down for a new one to be installed, a parallel system must be built.

“It’s like trying to fix an airplane while it’s flying in the air,” said Dr Jacobson. “It’s expensive. It takes time, it takes resources, it takes space, and nobody’s had the will to do that until you get a crisis.”

The FAA has promised sweeping upgrades: swopping copper lines for fibre optics, building new radar hubs, and redesigning Philadelphia’s air traffic control centre from the ground up.

Whether that momentum will last long enough for changes to take effect remains to be seen.

“Newark’s situation is shining a bright light on the situation. But, eventually, the light will fade, especially if there are no incidents,” said Dr Jacobson.

Until then, the strategy remains: fewer planes in the sky.

Incidents prior to the April 28 outage at Newark also raised questions about the resilience of America’s air traffic control system.

Just months earlier, a midair collision over Washington’s congested airspace killed 67 people, prompting national scrutiny.

Since then, Reagan National Airport in Washington has reported multiple near-misses, including a Delta flight narrowly avoiding military aircraft and a taxiway collision between two commercial jets, one carrying members of Congress.

In February, a coalition of 34 aviation organisations issued a formal plea to Congress to modernise the system, urging investments in staffing, infrastructure, and flexible budgeting.

But just as calls for reform were growing louder, the Trump administration quietly began firing hundreds of FAA employees, including those overseeing radar maintenance. It also disbanded the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, tasked with reviewing national aviation safety.

The abrupt dismissals further rattled a system already under strain. A 2025 Government Accountability Office study found that over 75 per cent of the country’s 138 air traffic control systems were either unsustainable or potentially unsustainable.

More air traffic controllers needed

The technical difficulties have compounded human shortages.

The Philadelphia radar facility responsible for Newark’s airspace has just 22 certified controllers, but it needs 38. On one recent shift, only three people were on duty, managing hundreds of flights.

That is partially because of the nature of the job. The work is gruelling and the entry bar is high.

Applicants must be under 31 years old and US citizens, and pass rigorous medical and cognitive tests. Only about 10 per cent make it through the selection process.

To address the shortfall, the Transportation Secretary has unveiled a plan to “supercharge” hiring. The initiative includes pay bumps for graduates of the controller academy, retention incentives and efforts to streamline the application process.

The FAA hopes to hire 2,000 new controllers in 2025, gradually scaling up over the years to close a staffing gap of about 3,000.

Yet, even as the FAA works to expand hiring, the Trump administration has been trimming federal jobs within the agency.

More than 2,700 FAA employees have enrolled in a “deferred resignation programme”, which allows them to go on paid leave through September, after which they must exit.

In the aftermath of the April 28 outage, five air traffic controllers at the Philadelphia facility walked off the job for 45 days, citing trauma.

One of them, Mr Jonathan Stewart, a senior controller with decades of experience, has been one of the few willing to speak publicly.

In the weeks that followed, he found himself juggling multiple positions without breaks, manually jotting down call signs in a notebook, just in case the radar screens went dark again.

Exhausted and overwhelmed, the 45-year-old air traffic control supervisor was pushed into a third straight hour on duty on May 4 when he spotted two planes speeding towards each other on his screen. A midair collision was seconds away.

Mr Stewart barked instructions into his headset, ordering the pilots to turn. The planes veered apart just in time.

“Get me out of here,” he said, throwing his headset across the room. Shaking with anger, he was overwhelmed by how close he had come to being responsible for a collision.

Speaking to ST about the close shave, he said: “I missed it, and I missed it because I was tired; and I told them I was tired... They said, basically, ‘suck it up’.”

As a supervisor, he is not protected by the union’s two-hour cap on continuous work that applies to regular air controllers.

Mr Stewart is currently on medical leave and seeing a psychiatrist.

“I’m never going to go back until they fix the problem,” he said.

“I will not put myself in that situation ever again, nor will I be in charge of somebody who’s also working under those conditions.”