Air traffic controllers in the U.S. have experienced about 1,000 equipment failures a week due to ancient equipment, a former federal aviation official and several airline industry insiders told the New York Post.
The report comes less than a week after a 90-second equipment failure at Newark Liberty International Airport caused air traffic controllers' communications to go dark, sparking hundreds of flight delays and disrupting travel for thousands for days.
The cause was a single unsheathed copper wire at the air traffic control center in Philadelphia.
"This is a copper wire system, and frankly the FAA is experiencing almost 1,000 outages a week," one airline industry official told the Post, referring to the Federal Aviation Administration.
"Some outages are worse than others — but the bad thing about them is you can't predict them."
The current "air traffic control dilemma" is entirely due to "archaic" equipment, David Grizzle, a former FAA chief operating officer, told the Post.
"Historically, we have assured safety by trading off inefficiency, and so we would just slow the traffic down more and more and more to keep it safe," Grizzle said.
But "when you start having unscheduled outages like what happened at Newark — you can't do the safety-for-efficiency tradeoff like we've been doing."
"Today at Newark the average flight is four hours delayed," he went on. "The FAA is holding planes on the ground all over the country in order to meter the number of arrivals down to a small enough number to safely manage it with the staffing and the unreliable equipment that they have."
The Trump administration this week proposed spending billions of dollars to reform the aging air traffic control system and boost hiring.
Congress is also considering $12.5 billion in initial funding as part of a bill under consideration.
Solange Reyner ✉
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
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