Outages aside, Transportation Sec. says it’s safe to fly out of Newark

Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy on Sunday stressed that it s safe to fly into and out of New Jersey s Newark Liberty International Airport despite lately revealed outages affecting the busy airport s air traffic control systems At the same time Duffy commented the traffic at the busy airport would be reduced in an effort to reduce delays and cancellations I fly out of Newark all the time My family flies out of Newark When we saw these two incidents when we have issues there are policies and procedures in place for controllers and for pilots They know what to do It is not ideal by any stretch but they do implement those procedures and they stay away from each other and vacate the airspace Duffy described NBC s Meet the Press with Kristen Welker in an interview Sunday Duffy s reassurances come after it was revealed that the radar system tracking flights over New Jersey went black for a minute-and-a-half on Friday the second time such an outage has been communicated in as various weeks and as the FAA revealed there was a brief telecommunications issue on Sunday at the Philadelphia facility that controls traffic for Newark Duffy warned that if something isn t done to fix the system Newark may not be the only place that sees such outages The former Congressman commented the root of the difficulty is that the hardware used by the U S air traffic controllers is at best sometimes years old and that both the constituents and Congress are just now beginning to notice because the lights are blinking the sirens are turning And they re saying Listen we have to fix this because what you see in Newark is going to happen in other places across the country It has to be fixed and so what we re having is chosen telecom issues but we re also having various glitches in our solution As the information comes in it s overloading certain of our lines and the system goes down he commented Duffy also revealed that FAA staffing for the airport had been reduced after we lost a scarce controllers who were stressed out by the first connectivity that we lost last week and that there are fewer controllers covering Newark s airspace at the moment As a consequence Newark will see a reduction in air traffic for the next several weeks Duffy commented and patron traffic will be prioritized so that passengers don t get to the airport wait four hours and then get delayed Duffy did not specify how long several weeks is in practice nor did he say precisely how much air traffic might be reduced The former Fox Business host revealed in the coming days he s convening a meeting of all the airlines that serve Newark in order to get those companies to agree on how they will alter their flight schedules and indicated he expects connectivity issues at Newark to be solved by the end of the summer We are building a new line that goes directly from Newark to the Philly Terminal Radar Approach Control which controls the New York airspace What happens now is it goes from Newark to New York TRACOM which is where it used to be controlled and then down to Philly That doesn t make sense We re going to have a direct line there Duffy announced United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby proven the upcoming meeting during an appearance on CBS Face the Nation on Sunday According to Kirby serious reductions in traffic to Newark will likely last until mid June when a runway construction project is due to be completed but traffic into New Jersey will likely see several restrictions through August Kirby stated that he is not concerned about safety at Newark or anywhere else because the air traffic control system as a whole is designed to handle an occasional outage What happens when these issues occur they do occur sometimes at other places is that we have those fallback procedures We fall back on those procedures We slow the airspace down We have fewer flights but we keep everything safe and we get the airplane safely on the ground he stated The FAA is now running about air traffic controllers short of optimal staffing according to Duffy As a stopgap fix while the administration tries to bring new controllers into the field the transportation secretary announced he will be upping the mandatory retirement age from to and is looking into providing bonus incentives for controllers who agree to delay their retirement What I ve done I disclosed Hey listen These are the best controllers we have in the airspace Let s give them a bonus I m going to give them a upfront bonus to stay on the job Don t retire Keep serving your country And these are the best guys he declared Last Thursday the Trump Administration unveiled a plan to overhaul the nation s air traffic control system over the next several years The proposal according to the White House calls for replacing outdated infrastructure with state-of-the-art fiber wireless and satellite technologies at over air traffic control sites including new radios new radars and new voice switches and the construction of six new air traffic control coordination centers In unveiling the plan Duffy did not give an firm estimated cost but announced that will price tag will be billions lots of billions Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy Photo by Anna Moneymaker Getty Images File Passengers arrive at Terminal B at Newark Liberty International Airport in Newark New Jersey last week Photo by Kena Betancur AFP File