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Title: The Newark Airport Crisis is About To Become Everyone's Problem

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/05/26/1952...

Newark Liberty International Airport has suffered six radar and radio outages
in nine months, with the most recent occurring May 9th when controllers told
pilots "our scopes just went black again" before handing off flights to other
facilities. The outages have forced flight cancellations, diversions, and
delays lasting over a week as airlines repositioned aircraft and crews. The
Federal Aviation Administration created the problem by relocating Newark's
air traffic control operations from the understaffed N90 facility on Long
Island to Philadelphia in 2024. Only 17 of 33 controllers accepted the move
despite $100,000 relocation bonuses, leaving operations short-staffed. Rather
than build new STARS servers in Philadelphia, the FAA opted to send radar
data over 130 miles of commercial copper telephone lines. The remote feeds
have experienced approximately 10 minutes of downtime over 10 months --
exceeding the agency's reliability standards and occurring 200 times more
frequently than the FAA's internal analysis predicted. The agency
simultaneously laid off over 100 maintenance technicians and
telecommunications specialists in February, further straining an air traffic
control system that suffers around 700 outages weekly nationwide while
managing 16.8 million annual flights with 1990s-era technology.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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