Photo: AFP
At most major American airports over the coming week, the inception of the Real I.D. program might be the reason for any anticipated delays or problems arising on a given flight. At Newark Liberty Airport, however, there are far more pressing causes for a recent and growing spate of flight delays and cancellations. The most troubling incident involved a loss of radar and contact between the planes and air traffic controllers on April 28th that lasted up to 90 seconds. The FAA says that several controllers have requested time off to recover from the stress of dealing with the outage, leaving air traffic control understaffed and creating more problems.
ABC World News aviation expert John Nance is among the critics who say the chaos at Newark isn’t going away anytime soon. He appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to lay out three reasons why flying out of Newark has become such a headache recently.
“First of all, air traffic control,” Nance told host Larry Mendte. “A number of [controllers] took leave to just calm down, and you can appreciate this if you know the pressures of the job. Well, that meant they didn’t have enough air traffic controllers to bring the airplanes in and out, and so that put delays in immediately. Second, a runway has been taken out of service for maintenance [until at least next month]… and then, when you put that all together with the ripple effect, which is the effect that you have all across the country with planes coming in and out of Newark, they get delayed two, three, four hours, and the whole system begins to stagger.”
Nance feels some of the problem could have been avoided if Congress had better funded programs to train air traffic controllers. “We have about 14,000 air traffic controllers; we need about 3,000 more, and when you consider how long it takes to bring somebody in to train them- the fact that, if you hire 100 people, maybe you’ll get 20 that can go on through the course, and that takes years. We’ve had this problem for a long time, and this problem actually comes right back to Congress’ doorstep.”
Photo Credit: Getty Images