Sen. Schumer calls for probe into FAA operations amid ongoing Newark airport delays

Evan Simko-Bednarski, New York Daily News on May 5, 2025

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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Monday called for a federal investigation of the FAA amid ongoing delays at Newark Airport.

“The chaos at Newark Airport could very well be a national harbinger if all these issues aren’t fixed, and if the FAA can’t get real solutions to these problems off the ground,” Schumer said. “(I)t is quite clear that the FAA is just a mess right now.”

Delays at Newark have been mounting since the afternoon of April 28, when twin failures of the FAA’s air traffic control network — one affecting controllers’ radar screens and the other affecting their communications — ground air traffic to a halt for two hours.

Sources told the Daily News that those issues have both been fixed — albeit temporarily — but in the days since, a shortage of air traffic controllers responsible for the airspace over northern New Jersey has led to persistent cancellations and delays.

In a Monday letter to Mitch Behm, the acting inspector general for the U.S. Department of Transportation, Schumer demanded an inquest into last week’s dual outages as well as the shortage of air traffic controllers certified to guide planes across northern New Jersey — home to Newark, Teterboro and Morristown airports.

“I am calling on you to investigate the FAA’s administrative, operational and capital functions to deliver more for the American people,” Schumer wrote.

Specifically, Schumer said he was seeking answers as to why Philadelphia’s Terminal Radar Approach Control facility — known as TRACON— is tasked with guiding pilots to airports in Eastern Pennsylvania and northern New Jersey but was not included in a May pay bump issued by the FAA in an effort to attract more employees to “hard to staff” locations. New York and Washington, D.C.’s TRACONs were also omitted from the list.

Schumer also asked Behm to dig into the FAA’s plans to upgrade the infrastructure that relays radar and communication data to controllers — the same radar and telcom networks that failed last week.

Control of the airspace over northern Jersey was transferred from NYC TRACOM on Long Island to the Philadelphia control center last summer in an effort to lessen the load on the Nassau County facility.

Sources told The News that while control of the airspace is now handled by the city of brotherly love, the radar feeds of the skies above Jersey are still sent to Long Island. The feeds must then be transmitted to controller’s screens in Philly, a situation that is prone to latency and outages.

That system, along with the telecommunications network that lets controllers talk to planes and local airport control towers, failed for at least two hours last Monday, according to sources familiar with the outage.

Of the 25 Philly-based air traffic controllers qualified to guide planes through the north Jersey airspace, at least five took contractually-allowed leave following the radar and comms failure — a move that some, including United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby, have called an unofficial work action by the unionized controllers.

United subsequently cut 35 daily flights from the airport on Sunday, about 10% of the carrier’s schedule.

A spokesman for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association — the controllers’ union — did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

As of midday Monday, more than 150 flights through Newark had been canceled, and 265 flights had been delayed.

In a statement, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns Newark, JFK and La Guardia airports, called on the FAA to do more.

“The Port Authority has invested billions to modernize Newark Liberty, but those improvements depend on a fully staffed and modern federal air traffic system,” a spokesperson for the bi-state agency said. “We continue to urge the FAA to address ongoing staffing shortages and accelerate long-overdue technology upgrades that continue to cause delays in the nation’s busiest air corridor.”

Aidan O’Donnell, the Port Authority’s general manager for New Jersey airport operations, told The News Monday that he empathized with travelers.

“We recognize that they have places to be, or they want to come home,” he said. “Nobody finds the level of delay that our customers have been subjected to in any way acceptable.”

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