Chaos Continues at Newark Airport

The madness and mayhem at Newark Liberty International Airport has shown no sign of ending, a week into the bedlam. Despite Trump's Federal Aviation Administration's released plan to overhaul the airport’s air traffic control system, the trouble continues.

Yesterday, the nation’s 12th-busiest airport had 84 cancellations and 26 delays, all before noon, according to the flight-tracking site FlightAware.

Earlier in the day, the FAA released a statement that Transportation Secretary, and reality show sex pest Sean Duffy is taking action to “immediately” address the tech issues and lack of staffing that have triggered hundreds of flight disruptions over the last week.

Many of the planned changes are for the system that processes radar data for the Newark controllers, which catastrophically failed last week. Due to this failure, for more than 90 seconds, the planes were flying completely blind. The incident was so jarring that several controllers involved had to take “trauma leave.”

Duffy and the FAA are aiming to avoid another catastrophe by adding three new communications connections, installing a backup system, and replacing copper wire with fiberoptic cables. The silver lining of this chaos is that the FAA said it has also increased Newark’s inadequate air traffic control staffing, which has reportedly been amplifying the problems at the airport.

An air traffic controller last week told news media that the airport “is not a safe situation right now for the flying public.” They urged travelers to “avoid Newark at all costs.”

“You’re starting to see cracks in the system,” Duffy said at a news conference last Thursday. “It‘s our job to actually see over the horizon what the issues are and fix it before there is an incident that we will seriously regret.”

Duffy’s tenure as transportation secretary has been marked by a string of aviation disasters and near-misses, including a mid-air crash over Washington, D.C., that killed 67 in late January.

A Newark air traffic controller in the room for the 90-second outage told CNN, “It was just by the grace of God that there wasn‘t another plane in its way. We all expected what happened in D.C. to happen here.”

In February, amid the Elon Musk-led push to reduce federal staffing, the FAA cut 400 workers, but Duffy said at the time that “zero air traffic controllers and critical safety personnel were let go.”

However, during a closed-door March Cabinet meeting, Duffy accused Musk’s team at the Department of Government Efficiency of trying to fire air traffic controllers, which the world’s richest man dismissed as a “lie.”