(Bloomberg) — Airlines and US aviation officials plan to meet on further flight cutbacks at Newark airport following multiple breakdowns in radar systems, according to people familiar with the matter.
The plan currently under consideration would encourage carriers to voluntarily decrease the number of flights for a limited period at the transportation hub outside New York City, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private deliberations. The Department of Transportation is expected to schedule discussions with airline leaders in the coming weeks, one of the people said.
The urgency for such a meeting was underscored Friday by a second incident in which air traffic controllers guiding planes in and out of Newark Liberty International Airport briefly lost communications and radar displays. It follows a similar breakdown on April 28. Neither resulted in injuries or accidents.
Among the goals of the planned discussions is to reduce daily operations to a specific rate that can be handled by the air traffic control facility in Philadelphia that has been beset by a shortage of air traffic controllers and outdated technology, one of the people said.
A reduction in Newark flights would address a key complaint by United Airlines Holdings Inc. Chief Executive Officer Scott Kirby, who has faulted the Federal Aviation Administration for allowing more plane traffic than the airport can reliably support. In a memo this week, he called for authorities to limit flights to 48 per hour while runway construction is underway and 77 per hour during normal operations, below levels that can sometimes exceed 80.
The breakdown Friday occurred about 3:55 a.m. at the FAA facility and lasted about 90 seconds, the agency said in a statement. Air traffic controllers alerted a FedEx Corp. aircraft that their “scopes just went black again,” according to an audio recording of the communication.
The prior outage and resulting staffing shortfall contributed to days of disruptions at the busy hub, disrupting hundreds of flights and prompting United to begin cutting 35 daily round trips at the airport, its biggest for international departures.
United, which accounts for the majority of flights at the airport, has voluntarily trimmed operations at Newark at least three previous times, and its daily flights are now a third less than they were prior to the pandemic. The airline still accounts for 68% of departures, according to aviation data provider Cirium.
Besides United, other carriers that serve Newark include Delta Air Lines Inc., Spirit Aviation Holdings Inc. and American Airlines Group Inc.
The FAA on Wednesday said it would install a temporary backup system at the Philadelphia facility for redundancy while accelerating work to upgrade communications infrastructure at the site, including the replacement of older copper wires with fiber optic lines. US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on Thursday announced a sweeping plan to upgrade air traffic control systems across the country over the next three to four years.
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