As few as three air traffic controllers were scheduled to work on Monday evening at the facility guiding planes to and from Newark Liberty International Airport, the Federal Aviation Administration said, far fewer than the target of 14 controllers for most of those hours.
The staffing crisis added strain to an already troubled aviation system, with flights to Newark delayed by as much as seven hours on Monday.
The F.A.A. said in a statement to The New York Times that it had at least three controllers scheduled every hour on Monday evening at a Philadelphia facility that manages Newark’s air traffic. But four people familiar with problems at the airport said that the number of fully certified controllers on duty was at times one or two.
Staffing shortages affected flights at the airport for much of the day, forcing the F.A.A. to hold up incoming flights from taking off. The delays primarily affected flights coming to Newark from the contiguous United States and parts of Canada, and lasted an average of more than an hour and 40 minutes and up to almost seven hours, according to an online F.A.A. advisory.
Monday’s delays were the latest in a string of setbacks for Newark, one of the nation’s busiest airports and a large hub for United Airlines. On Friday, the air traffic control facility in Philadelphia that guides planes at the airport had a brief radar outage. A similar outage late last month had left controllers unable to communicate with pilots for about 30 seconds.
That outage, on the afternoon of April 28, had followed months of glitches and other problems that have rattled the controllers who manage the Newark airspace. Some of the controllers went on leave to recover from the stress of those delays.
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