US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that Newark airport would see “several weeks” of reduced capacity as officials grapple with spiraling delays and safety lapses at one of the country’s busiest hubs.
“We’re having these glitches in the system,” Duffy said in an interview that is to air Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press with Kristen Welker. “So we slow it down and keep people safe. That’s what we do.”
Newark Liberty International Airport, where United Airlines Holdings Inc. operates 68% of the airport’s flights, experienced two jarring radar and communications failures in two weeks. The outages prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to propose limiting the airport to no more than 56 total operations per hour.
On Sunday, an FAA equipment failure prompted a temporary ground stop at Newark. Controllers briefly slowed arriving and departing flights due to a “telecommunications issue” at a Philadelphia air traffic control center that was implicated in last week’s 90-second outage, according to the FAA’s website.
Duffy said it could take three to four years to build new infrastructure to improve the system’s resilience, even as he suggested the safety concerns may not be limited to Newark.
“I’m concerned about the whole airspace,” he said. “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.”
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said the airline is putting bigger planes on Newark routes to make up for flight volume limits.
“So, put a larger airplane, have fewer flights, but with bigger airplanes to maintain the number of seats that we have flying in and out of Newark,” he said on CBS’s Face the Nation. United has a hub at Newark.
He sought to reassure travelers about US aviation safety, saying United diverted 42 aircraft to other cities in the Northeast to “maintain an even higher margin of safety” during the 90-second outage that hit Newark. “So it’s absolutely 100% safe,” he said.
Duffy has called for the construction of six new air traffic control centers and the replacement of more than 600 radars, as well as upgrading the agency’s obsolete telecommunications network with new fiber, wireless and satellite systems. The plan, which is expected to cost tens of billions of dollars, would need congressional approval.
Congress is currently struggling with finding billions of dollars worth of cuts in federal spending to pay for President Donald Trump’s proposed tax cuts.
But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, urged the FAA to prioritize repairs and upgrades at Newark.
“The FAA must put Newark first and put everything they’ve got into fixing Newark as soon as possible,” Schumer told reporters at his New York office. “This situation cannot last. We need all hands on deck—make Newark number one. Get it done, and get it done fast.”
Duffy also denied that billionaire Elon Musk, in his role heading the Department of Government Efficiency, had asked the agency to cut air traffic controllers.
“He never called me and said, ‘Cut air traffic control.’ He would never do that,” Duffy said. “This was a broader conversation about what positions are going to be preserved, right?”
He added, “You can actually be more efficient and still accomplish the mission of safety, which is what I think we can do. And actually, we are doing that.”
United has “a reasonable chance at actually growing our earnings year over year” as demand picked up slightly in May after a downturn early this year, Kirby said, according to a CBS transcript of his comments.
