The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Tuesday announced an extension till June of the current flight restrictions at the Newark Liberty International Airport.The curbs have been in effect ever since air traffic controllers first lost their radar and radios briefly last month.“Our goal is to relieve the substantial inconvenience to the travelling public from excessive flight delays due to construction, staffing challenges, and recent equipment issues, which magnify as they spread through the National Airspace System,” news agency AP quoted acting FAA Administrator Chris Rocheleau as saying.Under the interim rule, the number of arrivals and departures at Newark Liberty are capped at 28 apiece per hour. That’s in line with the limits imposed after about half a dozen air traffic controllers went on a 45-day “trauma leave following” an outage in April.In mid-June, the limit could be raised after a runway construction project largely wraps up, and the controllers on leave would be scheduled to return. Following that, as per the FAA, it could possibly increase the cap to 34 arrivals and 34 departures an hour, which would bring it closer to the 38 or 39 flights which typically took off and landed hourly before the problems.The FAA announcement, meanwhile, came a day after there was an outage at Newark, the airport’s fourth since the last week of April.On April 28 and May 9, controllers at Philadelphia ATC, which directs planes in and out of Newark, were unable to see or communicate with the flights around the airport for as long as 90 seconds. This was because the main line which carries the radar signal down from another FAA facility in New York failed, and the backup line didn’t work immediately.The lines, some of which were old copper wires, failed a third time May 11, but the backup system worked and the radar stayed online. After the first outage, the already shorthanded Philadelphia ATC lost five to seven controllers to trauma leave. That left Newark unable to handle all the scheduled flights, leading to hundreds of cancellations and delays.The FAA quickly limited the number of flights to between 24 and 28 arrivals and the same number of departures every hour to ensure the remaining controllers could handle them safely. Officials have said the problems affecting Newark are a “prime example” of why the entire air traffic control system needs to be overhauled.Transportation secretary Sean Duffy announced a multibillion-dollar plan to upgrade America’s aging air traffic control system earlier this month. The House tentatively included $12.5 billion in the overarching bill that Republicans are trying to pass now, but officials have called that amount just a down payment on the overall plan.
