An air traffic control facility that guides planes at Newark Liberty International Airport had a brief radar outage on Friday morning, the latest technological disruption at one of the nation’s busiest airports.
The outage, which affected communications and radar displays at a facility in Philadelphia, occurred just before 4 a.m. and lasted about 90 seconds, the Federal Aviation Administration said.
A similar 90-second outage last week, on a Monday afternoon, upended travel at the airport, leaving controllers unable to communicate with pilots and keep planes from crashing into one another. Several controllers working that afternoon were distressed by that episode and took time off, which resulted in several days of low staffing at the facility, causing widespread flight delays and cancellations.
The problems at Newark and other aviation safety concerns have become a major challenge for President Trump. Just days after he took office, an American Airlines plane and Army helicopter collided near Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, killing everybody aboard both aircraft.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Friday that a “glitch in the system” had been caused in the morning by “the same telecom and software issues that were raised last week.”
“Everything went back online after the brief outage, and there was no operational impact,” Ms. Leavitt said. Federal transportation officials “are working to address this technical issue tonight, to prevent further outages,” and are planning to install new fiber-optic cables from the Newark airport to Philadelphia, she said. The goal is to have the system fully upgraded by the summer, she added.
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