The Newarkification of Flying
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The 2025 GMC Sierra lineup featuring the Sierra 1500, Heavy Duty, and EV. Because true bliss is removing every shadow from every doubt. We are professional grade. Visit GMC.com to learn more. When I called up Will Geisband, I wanted to know if passengers flying in or out of Newark Airport these days would notice anything different. I think the biggest thing you're probably going to notice are a lot more delays.

Will writes for the Air Current, and he covers air traffic control. — If you've paid attention to the news at all lately, I know that there have been a lot of staffing and equipment issues at Newark that have really constrained the airport's ability to operate.

United Airlines executives are trying to reassure their customers it is safe to fly at Newark as widespread cancellations and air traffic control issues spark concerns. Air traffic control screens have gone dark multiple times in the past two weeks. Now the FAA is asking airlines to cut down on flights to reduce delays. The airport is so short on air traffic control staffing, flights again were delayed this morning, according to the FAA.

Newark, for anyone who kind of is following aviation, is historically a chronically delayed airport. That's not new. But when you start to add in radar outages and telecommunications issues and air traffic controller staffing constraints, it really becomes a mess, frankly. And for folks flying through the airport, that means your flight might be delayed, your flight might be canceled.

Your flight might leave the gate and you might sit there taxiing to the runway for hours to only return to the gate. So things are in flux right now, for sure. Then there's what passengers don't see.

You know, you've got this confluence of really interesting issues, some that are unique to Newark, some that are happening across the country. So an air traffic controller staffing crisis, right? Just not enough people to work the scopes. Equipment issues, which is kind of twofold. One, we've got some unique equipment considerations in Newark. We've also got just the kind of crumbling infrastructure in the national airspace system that we've seen in the news lately.

Air traffic control systems that really just are not up to date with 21st century technology. And all this comes together for the folks behind the scenes. It makes their job a lot harder. On Monday, there were delays to and from Newark of up to seven hours. Last Friday, the air traffic control facility that controls the airport had a brief radar outage. And that followed an outage in April where radar and some radio communications were lost for almost 30 seconds.

None of that surprised Will, because it's all happened before. Today on the show, Newark is an outlier, yes, but it's also a poster child for everything that's wrong with our aviation system right now. I'm Lizzie O'Leary, and you're listening to What Next TBD, a show about technology, power, and how the future will be determined. Stick around. ♪

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The air traffic control system in the U.S. is a complicated network of responsibilities. And to understand the problems in Newark and across the country, you have to understand some of the basics. So in the United States, at least...

There are generally three specialties for air traffic controllers. You've got tower. So those are the folks in those big towering facilities that you see actually co-located at airports. They're overseeing airplanes when they're on the ground and when they're landing and taking off on a runway. When an airplane takes off and it leaves the immediate airport environment, it goes into what we call the terminal radar environment.

And these are kind of the on and off ramps to the sky. So this is when an airplane is climbing up to its cruise altitude or conversely, it's starting to descend into an airport. So that's when you're putting your seatbelt back on, you're putting your tray table back up.

And then lastly, you have the enroute centers, and that's exactly what it sounds like. So when you're at your cruising altitude, these controllers are responsible for maintaining separation between aircraft going from point A to point B. In terms of equipment, it might surprise you to know that it varies really from controller to controller. So the equipment that's being used in the tower is very different than the equipment that's being used by radar controllers and those enroute in terminal facilities.

Mainly because in the tower, a lot of our controlling is done visually. So when the weather is good, we can see airplanes and we can move them around. Towers also have additional technology that can be used when the weather isn't great. But those controllers in the radar environment, they are sitting often very far away from an actual airport in a dark room looking at our scope. How old are the systems we're talking about?

considerably old. I'm sure, you know, Secretary Sean Duffy was here, or he would tell you that a lot of these systems are decades old. I mean, radar itself is an advent of technology that really started in the 1930s. And it's evolved and changed, but the basic principle is the same. And we've also seen things that have augmented that technology, you know, satellite and GPS that have really made the system more robust and safer. But at its core, these systems are quite old, decades, if not more.

Then there is the well-documented shortage of air traffic controllers. Last year, the government said it hired 1,800 new controllers. That still leaves them, I think, 3,000 short of their goal. What kind of relationship, or I guess how do these two things fit together in a puzzle, the tech infrastructure that you're talking about and the controllers and controller shortage?

I think the way you need to think about this is that they are totally interdependent on each other. One, the system doesn't work if you don't have enough people to work it right. I mean, fundamentally, air traffic control is a human career, right? You can't exactly replace that job with AI or a computer, right, for the most part. So we need we need folks in seats controlling airplanes. That being said,

Just because you have folks in seats, you don't have the technology to allow them to do their job. Doesn't even really matter, right? So you need both. If I show up to my job to control airplanes in California, for example, and I can't turn on the radar display in front of me, it's not going to matter if I'm there, right? So it's this nexus of both of these things that we absolutely need. We can't have one without the other. When either one is out of whack, it throws the whole system into flux.

I want to talk a little bit about how Newark fits into this picture historically. Prior to 2024, prior to last year, how busy was the airspace? What kind of staffing and operational issues had the whole kind of Newark Liberty airspace had?

So just stepping back for a second, New York is some of the most complex airspace in the country, if not the world. You've got three enormous international gateways, John F. Kennedy Airport on Long Island, LaGuardia Airport, and then also, you know, obviously New York Airport in New Jersey.

in addition to a couple other business aviation airports, as well as airports like White Plains and Stewart, which are a little further north of the city. So the confluence of all these things is just a really jam-packed airspace, some of the most competitive airspace in the world, too. It's incredibly busy. Prior to 2024, the air traffic facilities in New York in particular have experienced a lot of ups and downs. There was actually this really fantastic piece in The New York Times dating back to 1996,

It's written by Darcy Frey. It's called Something's Got to Give. I like to tell people, if you go read that story and you copied and pasted it into some publication in 2025, it would be, like, mostly correct. A lot of the issues that were happening in the 90s, you know, not all of them, but a good amount of them, you know, broken equipment, not enough people to staff the scopes. But in practical terms, broadly, that means that, you know, all the facilities in New York really having trouble retaining people, you know,

Not a ton of folks, this is kind of from the FAA, not a ton of folks wanted to move to New York to work air traffic there. One, because there was this broader kind of perceived cultural issue, and that's talked about extensively. These are the folks who are at the top of their game, but with that often comes a lot of interesting characters. And also, too, New York is like obviously not an inexpensive place to live. As of last year,

All of the New York approach and departure facilities combined were staffed at just 61% of their maximum authorized hiring level. For context, the FAA considers a facility healthy, so it has a healthy number of controllers at 85%. Wow, that's a big gap. It's a huge gap. It gets worse, though, because Newark last year was at 52%, even lower.

So in many ways, Newark was feeling the impacts of a lot of these acute issues in New York the most. So the FAA decides to make a change. Can you explain that and tell me what happened? In July of last year, the FAA officially relocated 24 controllers who were working the Newark airspace.

from that New York approach and departure facility on Long Island to the Philadelphia TRACON in Philadelphia, Philadelphia approach and departure facility.

And the reason why they did this, it's very complicated, but the kind of overarching theory here is that they were trying to just change up the deck of cards. The FAA had tried so many things to fix staffing in New York. They had tried to offer financial incentives. By and large, the controllers in New York make the most money out of any facility in the country well into the six figures when taken with overtime and that sort of thing.

They went to Congress and asked for what's called direct hire authority. So they could hire folks directly from the locale around New York so that you didn't have to necessarily also entice people to move. That didn't really work either. Their current found last year, the FAA had spent millions of dollars and they really, really hadn't found a good solution. And one source described it to me as sort of this was the FAA's last choice after they tried everything else.

And they wanted to one, try to move the newer controllers away from some of those cultural issues that I described that were also talked about in the piece, and also move them to a facility that was better equipped for growth. And so the idea was if you move them to Philly, there might be more interest there. And also the Philadelphia facility had just received millions of dollars and equipment upgrades and also like kind of small things like it had more physical space to allow for more controllers.

So when you think about all this, the idea was maybe we could start over and create a healthy pipeline of trainees who would come into Philly and do better there. And last year, that plan went into effect. This has been years in the making here. This is something that's been discussed in our traffic circles for a while.

Okay, so here we are. It's May of 2025. You've been reporting on this for a while. I was struck by the fact that you reported on three separate radar failures at Newark last summer. So can we connect the dots that the issues we're seeing at Newark now are because of the Philadelphia switch, or is it because Newark has always been an issue or some combination of the two?

I would say it's definitely a combination of the two, but we can absolutely connect them. The air current last year during these Labor Day outages reported that the reason that this kept happening was because some of the equipment, the telecommunications equipment that was set up during that move failed.

So when controllers are on Long Island and they're working all that radar traffic in the New York area, there's all these big systems that are used like radar and different location acquisition systems that feed into technology and then appear on the scope as a position.

So effectively what the FAA did was instead of relocate that equipment from the New York area to the Philadelphia area, at least for the Newark folks, which would have been very expensive, takes a lot of time. They effectively just plugged in, if you're familiar with how a TV works, they plugged in an HDMI cord into that equipment and ran it all the way to Philly and plugged it into Philly. So they just mirrored it. Effectively, yes. It's literally called a mirrored feed.

And so a lot of the issues that we were seeing last year were when these mirrored feeds would go down and it was effectively like on if you ever tried to watch Netflix when like everyone in your house is also like gaming or like streaming something or watching YouTube. Like the system literally just couldn't handle all of the traffic. So when we went through these peak traffic periods, the system would shut down. That was what was happening last year. Oh, my God.

Yeah, it's pretty remarkable, right? And so the FAA told me at the time that they were instituting a couple different fixes. One, which was like an immediate patch to kind of shore up that bandwidth capability. So here we are in May of 2025. And I wouldn't say that the issues happening today are caused by the exact same things, but there are a couple connections and I can walk you through those if you'd like. Okay, so are they still mirroring the equipment?

Or have they actually moved stuff? So it's in progress. Secretary Sean Duffy said last week at the White House that they are trying to complete all of these, one, upgrades to the existing telecommunications infrastructure, and also to fully relocate everything over by this summer. Again, last year, we reported that was going to take five years. It's unclear if it's the exact same plan, but this is going to take five years.

this is obviously a huge undertaking that they are trying to kind of do very hastily because we're realizing how difficult the situation has gotten. So...

I don't want to be alarmist, but I was also really struck by something that Tom Costello, an NBC News aviation correspondent, said on the air. This is a guy who's covered aviation for a pretty long time. That a Newark controller told him, it's not safe, don't fly into Newark. That is a difficult thing to hear as a person who gets on airplanes. How do you think people should think about that?

Newark and the Newark airspace now? I'll say this. The airspace around Newark is safe. The FAA would not operate flights in and out of that airport if they did not think that it was safe. And they have different mechanisms to do that. Primarily, those delays that I talked about earlier. The reason you're seeing those delays is because the FAA wants to throttle things down to the point where the controllers and the equipment can handle it, right?

However, you know, I think that there are real issues here that have been the result of these kind of years-long decision-making processes surrounding, particularly in this case, the move. And that's the unique part about Newark. We need to think about how to properly set up our airspace system for the demand that we're seeing. And by the way, demand is only increasing. You know, it could potentially get worse in some cases if we don't solve it now. So I'm

It's safe. I see it as safe. I fly all the time. I fly through the New York area all the time. But also there are real issues that need to be solved. When we come back, the Trump administration says they have a plan to fix air traffic control. So let's talk about it. This episode is brought to you by Discover.

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Well, this, I think, then makes people wonder, is Newark representative of the American air traffic control system? Or maybe a better question is, how representative is it, if at all?

Newark is really, it is a unique area. In the same way, it's also unique by the way that it's been failing. It has one of the higher training failure rates in the country. Two-thirds of folks fail training in the New York area. So there's all these unique factors about the New York airspace in general. Again, not all airports in the country had their controllers relocated and equipment moved and so on. And I talk to folks in the air traffic control world these days nearly every day who tell me like,

Oh, you know, that's just like not how it's done elsewhere, right? Like there's a really unique aspects to New York. So that's a really important understand. Conventional wisdom would suggest you look elsewhere and you're like, wow, like, are we going to see like other New York's? Personally, I do not think that we will. That being said, the

National airspace system, you know, there are real cracks showing in our equipment and broader staffing of facilities and, you know, how controllers are filling those roles. This has been well publicized. Yeah, I'm looking at a GAO report from last year saying the assessment determined that of FAA's 138 systems, 51 were unsustainable and 54 were potentially unsustainable. That doesn't seem great.

It's not. Absolutely. And I think that GAO report, I remember specifically covering it. You know, I think it confirmed what a lot of folks who had been in the aviation world had been saying for a long time, which is like, hey, this is a real issue and we need to do something about this. So last week, the Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, announced this plan to modernize the air traffic control system. What is in it?

I would call it more of a proposed blueprint. I think it's really important to understand that they have not secured any money for this initiative yet. There's strong backing from industry and also from lawmakers. But the real caveat here is they've got to get it through Congress. And as we all know, that can often be a very complicated process. But

There's tons in it. I mean, tons. Just kind of rattling off a few statistics here. They're looking to add 4,000 high-speed network connections, 25,000 new radios to enable voice over IP technology so you can have clearer voice communications between pilots and controllers.

technology that better allows controllers to monitor aircraft on the ground, which is actually where a lot of incidents happen. You know, those stories where airplanes are clipping wings or there's runway incursions and so on. And then also like replacement of the actual buildings and facilities. I mean, some of these buildings that air traffic controllers work in are like 60 years old and they're way past their usable lifespan. So tons in here. It is a colossal plan.

But also, haven't we just been through like literal years of discussion of FAA modernization? I mean, the last time I was covering regulatory policy in Washington was 2013, but they were talking about the next gen air traffic control system then.

Yeah, so NextGen, you know, started in the early 2000s, was kind of heralded as effectively the same kind of initiative that we're talking about today, right, to your point. And interestingly, NextGen actually was ordered to sunset by the end of 2025. So it's that at least...

name is going away. And I think a lot of people have whiplash over NextGen. In some senses, I think that NextGen did a lot of really important things. You know, it brought us ADS-B, which is, you know, was heavily delayed, but it's really, really awesome location tracking technology. I'm a pilot. Whenever I fly, I use ADS-B. I think it makes us all safer. Would we describe ADS-B as like anti-collision technology? Would you say that's the best way to describe it?

Sort of. It basically allows me to bring my iPhone into the cockpit and see all the airplanes around me and all the weather. Like for most pilots, like that was really not something that we were able to do before ADS-B. I think that there are real systemic blockers to how the agency's financial system is set up. So they are

always subject to things like government shutdowns and lapses in funding. Also, the FAA spends most of its budget allocated for, it's called facilities and equipment,

I would say 90% of that is used towards sustaining a lot of this old equipment as opposed to trying to invest in new equipment, right? And so there's this challenging nexus of like, how do I keep the system up and running, also invest in a new system while, you know, having finite resources? And to Secretary Duffy's credit, this is, I think, where he's trying to think outside the box, which is ask for all the money up front.

and also try to do it in a really short period of time. He's planning to do all those things I mentioned in three to four years, which, you know, if you talk to anyone in aviation is really, really quick, really quick. Yeah, four years does seem like a very fast timeline.

How would they be able to pull it off? It goes back to this whole ask for all the money up front thing. And if you know anything about Congress, they're not always apt to do that. And I think that's why it's so interesting that they didn't release the overall sort of estimates of how much this plan is going to cost. Because to me, like, that is the most important thing to whether it's successful or not.

It kind of came out in the days following the announcement that industry broadly is going to be asking Congress for about $31 billion at least. It's a lot of money to ask for up front. The House Transportation Committee has already set aside $12.5 billion in its own budget proposal for the air traffic control system. However, that figure was actually supposed to be $15 billion, and they had originally rolled out that bill at $15 billion.

And what happened was there was some scuffling over a proposal related to a highway transportation initiative. And so they had to pull some money away from the air traffic control side of things to fund that gap.

When you start to think about things like that, you see, oh, like, there's this constant balancing going on that may affect the overall ability for us to get that money. Granted, $12.5 billion in one year is a huge amount of money. The FAA really only ever gets $20 billion a year in its annual budget. So this is a lot of money. But 31, I mean, it's a lot. So one of the things I'm trying to understand here, because clearly this is something Duffy is putting a lot of energy into,

But at the same time, the Trump administration also disbanded the safety review team. So I'm like trying to figure out how all this stuff fits together because clearly there is a need. And yet some of the actions don't seem to be speaking to that.

Yeah. So, you know, I'm not going to pretend to try to like get in their heads necessarily, but I think you hit on something really important. So the safety review team was this sort of team convened a few years ago of experts, former FAA administrators and former air traffic executives, former union representatives to say, get in a room and think about the like most ambitious plan you can you can think of to fix the national airspace system.

In 2023, they released this landmark report that was super exhaustive. It talked about all these issues across air traffic control, and we talked about the funding things that I touched on and whatnot. And if you look at Duffy's proposal, there are echoes of what

the content of that report was. You know, it talks about the need to replace things like the buildings where traffic controls are working. That was like one of the big pieces of that report that said, oh, yeah, by the way, like all of these buildings are like way past their useful life. So, yeah, it is interesting to see this proposal being debuted at the same time when that group is being at least temporarily paused. So we'll see how that works.

All of this just seems to come back again and again to an issue that you've reported on, that I saw when I covered Congress and the agencies. Like, our air traffic control systems clearly need to be updated and modernized. Is there a realistic way that that can happen with the political system we currently have without something awful happening first?

I think this kind of goes back to actually something that I've been thinking about for a broader story, but I think it's actually super relevant here, which is that, unfortunately, in aviation, which I'll preface this by saying is the safest mode of transportation on the globe, it is literally more dangerous for you to drive to the airport in your car statistically than it is to get on an airplane. At the same time, often it takes a tragedy for real people

to happen in aviation. And I think that, you know, for folks who've covered and watched aviation, like the midair collision and the terrible midair collision in January in Washington really did bring this all back to the fore. So I guess the point I'm getting at is that when tragedy happens, it does really remind people of the importance of these sorts of initiatives. And I think, you know, despite how terrible those incidents are, this could be a good thing that comes out of them.

And so time will tell if we can do that. Industry says they're optimistic and I guess we'll have to check back in three or four years. Will, thank you so much for your reporting and for coming on to explain all of this. Thank you so much for having me. It was a great conversation.

Will Geisband is a reporter at The Air Current. And that is it for our show today. What Next TBD is produced by Patrick Fort and Shana Roth. Our show is edited by Evan Campbell. TBD is part of the larger What Next family. And if you're looking for even more Slate podcasts, I suggest Tuesday's episode of What Next. Mary spoke with David Hogg about cleaning house in the Democratic Party.

All right, we will be back on Sunday with an episode about what happens when you're the target of non-consensual deepfake pornography. I'm Lizzie O'Leary. Thanks so much for listening.

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