Telecom Outage Halted Arriving Flights at Newark Airport, FAA Says

A telecom frequency outage prompted the Federal Aviation Administration Thursday to halt arriving flights at Newark Liberty International Airport for more than an hour, the latest tech issue to snarl flights at the airport near New York City.

Flightradar24, a flight tracking site, said flights to Newark — the United Airlines hub — are currently halted and flights already in the air to Newark are holding but departures appear unaffected.

The FAA said delays for arriving flights are averaging 158 minutes and rising as flights resume after a halt of about 75 minutes.

There were two serious communications outages for air traffic controllers overseeing Newark’s airspace in April and May that disrupted hundreds of flights.

In May, the FAA ordered flight cuts at Newark following a series of major disruptions and has proposed to extend those through late October.

The FAA last year relocated control of the Newark airspace to Philadelphia to address staffing and congested New York City-area traffic.

Since then, the FAA has upgraded communications technology to prevent reoccurrences but it is still working to add air traffic controllers.

(Reporting by David Shepardson; editing by Diane Craft)