US Air Traffic Control Crisis Exposes Cracks in Global Aviation Hub

Outdated infrastructure, staff shortages, repeated safety incidents straining system

- Marina Lopes

WASHINGTON - Ms Lisa Vandever was already hours late when the pilot's voice came over the intercom: "There are 35 planes ahead of us."

The 62-year-old event planner from New Jersey had boarded the flight in Newark - already delayed and rescheduled - to go to California to help care for her elderly mother. Now, she sat trapped on the tarmac, one of thousands of passengers grounded after a communications blackout severed contact between pilots and air traffic controllers at Newark Liberty International Airport outside New York City on April 28.

"This doesn't have to be happening," Ms Vandever said. "We know these are aging systems. This should be an emergency situation."

The outage disrupted more than flights; it exposed a deeper crisis in America's skies: outdated infrastructure, a shrinking workforce, and repeated failures in the systems designed to keep planes safe.

In the weeks that followed, Newark Liberty, America's 12th busiest airport, suffered at least three more technical failures.

The ripple effects were swift: cascading delays, hundreds of cancellations, and, eventually, a 25 percent cap on the number of domestic and international flights arriving and departing hourly from Newark.

AN OVERBURDENED SYSTEM

The American Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) manages the world's largest and busiest airspace, which stretches almost 78 million sq km.

Over the last 50 years, air travel in the US has ballooned, but technology has not kept up.

The FAA attributed the outage at Newark to aging copper wire infrastructure that simply could not handle the volume of incoming data. Unlike high-bandwidth fiber optics, copper lines are easily overwhelmed.

Compounding the issue is the continued reliance on radars from the 1970s, instead of more modern satellites.