An air traffic control facility that guides planes at Newark Liberty International Airport suffered a brief radar outage on Friday morning, the latest technological disruption at one of the nation’s busiest airports.
The Federal Aviation Administration said that the outage, which affected communications and radar displays at the facility in Philadelphia, occurred just before 4 a.m. and lasted about 90 seconds.
A similar outage of about 90 seconds last week, on a Monday afternoon, upended travel at the airport, leaving controllers with no way 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.
An air traffic controller mentioned the outage to the pilot of FedEx flight 1989 around that time, according to a publicly available recording of air traffic control communications with pilots.
“FedEx 1989, I’m going to hand you off here, our scopes just went black again,” the controller said. “If you care about this, contact your airline and try to get some pressure for them to fix this stuff.”
“Sorry to hear about that,” the pilot replied.
ABC News reported on the outage earlier.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
Michael Levenson contributed reporting.