Newark Airport Radar Outage Strikes Again, Delaying More Flights (theverge.com) 36
Just days after a radar and communications outage at Newark Liberty International Airport, the FAA confirmed a second incident on May 9 that disrupted radar and radio contact for 90 seconds due to a telecom failure at Philadelphia TRACON. "As of 12:30PM ET, FlightAware stats showed 292 total delays for flights into or out of Newark, which is also experiencing delays due to runway construction," reports The Verge. From the report: After the first outage on April 28th, an air traffic controller who had been on duty that day told CNN it "...was the most dangerous situation you could have." CNN reports that after a change made last July, the airport's radar and radio communication flows over a single data feed from a facility in New York, where controllers used to manage Newark's flights, to Philadelphia.
The FAA has announced a plan to replace the current copper connection with fiber, as well as adding "three new, high-bandwidth telecommunications connections between the New York-based STARS and the Philadelphia TRACON," and more air traffic controllers. Until those and other changes are made, the agency also said a new backup system is being deployed in Philadelphia, but it's unclear when that will be available.
NBC News reports the Friday outage affected a limited number of sectors, but it's another incident in the string of issues that have highlighted the problems with the airport's aging control system and lack of staffing. [...] A statement from the FAA said, "Frequent equipment and telecommunications outages can be stressful for controllers. Some controllers at the Philadelphia TRACON who work Newark arrivals and departures have taken time off to recover from the stress of multiple recent outages."
The FAA has announced a plan to replace the current copper connection with fiber, as well as adding "three new, high-bandwidth telecommunications connections between the New York-based STARS and the Philadelphia TRACON," and more air traffic controllers. Until those and other changes are made, the agency also said a new backup system is being deployed in Philadelphia, but it's unclear when that will be available.
NBC News reports the Friday outage affected a limited number of sectors, but it's another incident in the string of issues that have highlighted the problems with the airport's aging control system and lack of staffing. [...] A statement from the FAA said, "Frequent equipment and telecommunications outages can be stressful for controllers. Some controllers at the Philadelphia TRACON who work Newark arrivals and departures have taken time off to recover from the stress of multiple recent outages."
First World Problems (Score:1)
Re:First World Problems (Score:4, Insightful)
"Airport not working" is definitely more of a third-world problem. People expect working infrastructure in the first world.
Re:First World Problems (Score:5, Informative)
Is anybody going to mention the $25B set aside under Biden to upgrade ATC? [senate.gov] and then cancelled by trump?
THIS is not a first or third world problem, this is s trump problem
Johnny! (Score:2)
Cut that out! [wizbangblog.com]
Re: Johnny! (Score:3)
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I am, and don't call me Shirley.
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Yeah, that means something. (Score:3)
What it means is "I'm taking the train until they get their sh*t together."
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Have you ridden a train on the NEC? You may want to hitchhike.
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F*ck it, I'll walk,
Backups? (Score:3)
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They would have to get approval, and buy separate hardware and get multiple carriers.
The company I work for was in the bidding to do just that about 10 years ago IIRC, but I don't know what happened to that project. It would have required twice as much hardware, and dual-carriers w/ separate paths (and this part is complicated, time consuming, and expensive. I know this because I've designed and implemented split-carrier paths before at a previous employer)
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Yeah, unfortunately the technology is not exactly inherently robust for long distance links. Improving the system ultimately requires reducing the reliance on human air traffic controllers... which has been a [failing] ongoing project for decades.
Re:Backups? (Score:5, Insightful)
The headlines are very confused. The actual radar may very well be located on top of the Newark tower, but the controllers are located in Philadelphia. Air traffic control consists of regional centres that control en route flights, approach and departure control that are responsible for lining up planes approaching airports and getting ones departing on their way, and things like tower and ground control responsible for landing and takeoff clearance, taxi instructions, etc.
The outage was with arrivals, which is located in Philadelphia. When they moved it there apparently some genius thought that a single connection was fine.
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What was the actual problem? The article only says "telecommunications outage." What does that mean? More importantly, why is this a hard problem to solve? The usual communications problems aren't that hard to solve. There's a mention of copper and "a change made last July [that resulted in] a single data feed from ... New York ... to Philadelphia." I'm not sure why copper is a problem. Yes, the single "feed" is likely a problem, but there's no explanation for what change was made and why the change
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It sounds like job sites were moved/consolidated as a way to address staffing shortages, and that necessitated changes to the network topography.
If they didn't have the means to hire more controllers, I'm guessing IT didn't have the means to establish redundant links either.
Re: Backups? (Score:1)
No they probably had IT personnel. More like they didn't have enough paperpushers on hand to guarantee a suitable level of compliance to whatever bullshit FAR and anything else FAA requires.
Might be a technical issue, in the strictest sense that no commercial source exists for a drop-in fiber to copper signal transceiver, but that's not really a problem either.
About ten years ago I ran into a related problem needing to turn lvds or rs422 or i don't even remember what into fiber. The one commercial supplier
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Sure a lot of regulations are bad, but most of the regulations in flying are written in blood. Those paper trails exist to ensure some idiot does replace a fuse with a piece of pipe causing the whole tower to suddenly go out because something blew up.
Given the DOGE efficiency mandates, perhaps the main problem is the backup link was inefficient - after al
Re: Backups? (Score:1)
Yes but the FAA is a federal agency. The regulations it follows for procurement are a superset of the ones written in blood and the ones written in ink that apply to the entire federal apparatus, everything from staplers at the Penragon to pushbrooms for janitors at the Smithsonian.
It would not at all surprise me if the latter were the bigger obstacle here.
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Don't forget DOGE took a chunk of people out as well. They didn't fire the ATCs, but they did fire the people who did the equipment maintenance and all the ancillary jobs that help ATC do their job.
You know, efficiency!
Likely stuff just
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I doubt "copper" is the problem. More than likely it's the usual thing: the lines are above ground and someone ran their car into a pole or something. Why did your DSL go out in the 2000s?
It sounds like Newark approach and departure control got moved from New York to Philadelphia. Probably because New York was too busy and Philadelphia was easier to expand, maybe because Philadelphia was next up for modernization and increasing capacity was easy to do, or maybe because the building just had room for more st
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So I wonder whether it's a similar issue at the airport (money!). If the phone companies aren't forced to take care of their infrastructure ("We'd rather focus on our lucrative cellular systems"), then th
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Can't set up a microwave relay?
Has there been a lot of advancement in microwave data transmission? I've worked at hospitals that used this years ago and it was less than reliable. Rain would cause degradation and heavy rain would shut it down. Flocks of birds also caused issues from time to time.
At 90ish miles between PHL and ERW, you'd need multiple relays which are just additional points of failure for an already unreliable system.
I believe ATC already has the radar set up at ERW. The problem is the controllers are in PHL. You need
Reason #97 (Score:2)
Gee, thanks, as if I needed yet another reason to avoid travel to or through the USA...
Re:Reason #97 (Score:4, Interesting)
Of the many counties I’ve visited, USA has always felt the most third world.
I think they built lots of infrastructure post WWII into the 70s, but being built primarily on capitalism (rather than a mix of socialism and capitalism like most other countries) and don’t tax me bro, have let all that infrastructure decline.
Re: Reason #97 (Score:1)
No it's that at some point in the 70s the environmentalists got it into their heads that building infrastructure made the earth go ouchie ouchie and we should stop.
Oftentimes you'll find half-built highways that were originally planned to be part of a whole road network and the 70s is usually the time the plans were abandoned.
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Or maybe the US is filled with right-wing nutjobs who don't want to pay taxes, and cities that are not allowed to run deficits, so everything [medium.com] is allowed [infrastruc...rtcard.org] to decay [cbsnews.com].
Re: Reason #97 (Score:1)
Cities and states run deficits every time their balance their budgets with a federal grant or reimbursement.
Down south (rwnjland if the propaganda is to believed) is where they have less restrictive environmental laws at the state and local level *and* where they actually build and upgrade their roads.
Up here in Massachusetts (where the state and local taxes are sky-high and we are presently looking at a roughly billion dollar surplus on a 50bn budget) it's pulling teeth to get a town to install a traffic l
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Down south? You mean like in Florida [wesh.com], Texas [sacurrent.com] and Mississippi [thenation.com]? Those beacons of conservatism?
Yeah, their infrastructure is going to shit too.
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Yeah, when you cross from Canada (Ontario) into the US (Northern New York and on down through Pennsylvania) it really does seem like you've entered a run-down third-world country. I was really taken aback by that the first time I crossed over on land.
How I would solve this (Score:4, Funny)
2) Have them make an Air Traffic Controller simulator, where the user can choose from several airports
3) Hope nobody has read Ender's Game
4) Profit!
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I thought I had read the book, but apparently not and I'm missing the joke. Willing to explain for the hard of laughing?
blah blah blahblablablah (Score:2)
We keep hearing about oh, outage outage. Can someone please find out what exactly failed? Is it that a vacuum tube burned out? Bad maintenance on copper cables? Poor design of failsafe? Shoddy materials imported from China? What? Damn journalists only parrot the obvious.
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