Is It Bad That Air Traffic Control Now Runs On Tinfoil, Morse Code, And 5 D Batteries?
Probably still Pete Hegseth's fault.
Radar and radio communications for Newark Liberty International Airport went dead for about 90 seconds last Monday, April 28, leaving air traffic controllers unable to see the planes they were supposed to be tracking, unable to communicate with their pilots, and unable to guess when the systems might come back online. It’s the kind of thing that just isn’t supposed to happen, what with jets full of people roaring through the air at hundreds of miles an hour, in close proximity to each other, and depending on controllers to safely coordinate where they’re going.
Eventually the equipment started working again at the control center for Newark, which is located in Philadelphia. Those duties were moved last year from a center in Long Island so that controllers there could focus solely on New York’s multiple airports.
The FAA yesterday said that the event and staffing shortages left some controllers so rattled that they “have taken time off to recover from the stress of multiple recent outages,” according to the agency. It is not known how many of the controllers joked that they had picked the wrong week to stop smoking, drinking, popping amphetamines, or sniffing glue, but we assume it was not zero. Hey, they watch movies too. (Fun Trivia Fact: The line about smoking actually came from Zero Hour, the old movie that Airplane is based on, and then they built on it.)
A source told the New York Post that the failure resulted from “a fried piece of copper wire” in the Philadelphia ATC center. Looks like they picked the wrong week to stop doing whatever it was that keeps the wires from frying.
In addition to the equipment failure, there’s already a nationwide shortage of air traffic controllers, so the flight backups rippling from the equipment disruption hit Newark especially bad last week, leading to more than 1,500 flights being delayed. United Airlines announced Friday it was cutting 35 daily flights in and out of Newark to ease pressure on its hub there. Just to give upset customers someone else to be angry at, United CEO Scott Kirby said in a message that “technology issues were compounded as over 20% of the FAA controllers for EWR walked off the job.”
Kirby went on to say that Newark’s air traffic control facility “has been chronically understaffed for years and without these controllers, it‘s now clear — and the FAA tells us — that Newark airport cannot handle the number of planes that are scheduled to operate there.”
How bad was it? One flight controller told MSNBC reporter Tom Costello that travelers should avoid flights in or out of Newark if they’re fans of getting where they’re going safely:
“He said, ‘It is not safe. It is not a safe situation right now for the flying public,’” Costello said of his conversation with the air traffic controller, which he described as, “Really an incredible statement, unsolicited. He just said that to me, and separately: ‘Don’t fly into Newark. Avoid Newark at all costs.’”
Air traffic controllers don’t have a reputation for hyperbole, as far as we know.
One thing that everyone agrees on is that the technology holding our air traffic control system together is horribly outdated, a chronic problem that goes back decades. Remember, air traffic controllers went out on strike in 1981 to protest being overworked, and to demand replacement of obsolete equipment, problems they said placed the public in danger. Ronald Reagan solved that problem by firing the striking controllers.
The technology has gotten a little better since then, according to Paul Rinaldi, a former leader of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association union.
“We have the best 1980s technology available,” says Rinaldi, such as the floppy disks that are used in air-traffic control towers across the country. Rinaldi, who formerly worked as a controller and testified before Congress in March, says there’s a computer screen over every controller’s workstation. “Some of them are those old little green computer screens,” he says, referring to the monochrome monitors that provide controllers with information, like bad weather or delays. “Usually every day, they have to update something on it,” he says. “And when they have to update something on it, they use either a five-inch or a three-and-a-half-inch floppy disc.”
But don’t fret, that’s only an extreme example. Rinaldi added that most American ATC tech is more up-to-date; at least equal to that of the first iPhones, while the rest of the world’s airports are around an iPhone 6. This is a good joke for people who know Apple products; the current model is the iPhone 16, and yes I had to google that.
More to the point, the controller shortage goes back nearly as long, because Republicans have for decades preferred tax cuts for billionaires over paying for new equipment or staff, because government is bad and if we just privatize everything, then the market will make everything better. Unless it doesn’t.
It’s just plain hard to find people who can handle the stress and attention to detail necessary to be good air traffic controllers, as aviation safety consultant Jeff Guzetti explained to New York magazine. Controllers need a certain kind of brain to be able to “mentally picture three dimensions with a bunch of targets moving at different vectors and different speeds.”
And even if you had a crop of just the right people to hire today, Guzetti explained, “It takes two to three years to train a controller — and that’s after you get them through the Federal Aviation Administration’s academy, where there could be a 40 percent washout rate.”
And that, kids, is why even though Donald Trump fantasized in February about replacing the nation’s air traffic controllers with Elon Musk’s DOGEwankers, you can’t simply solve a long-term technological and personnel problem simply by ramping up hiring, making sure that only white males with crew cuts work as controllers, or forcing the FAA to connect all its computers using Musk’s Starlink satellite internet company.
Hey, what happened to that, anyway? Back in February, there was a lot of buzz around the possibility that Musk’s company had an inside track to take over a $2 billion IT modernization contract awarded to Verizon in 2023. That speculation was fueled by the FAA’s agreement to test some Starlink equipment at a few sites, along with news that three SpaceX software developers had been granted “ethics waivers” to let them work on the project.
But by early March, SpaceX was denying that it was out to take anything over, saying that instead its systems might be “a possible partial fix to an aging system.” At most, the company said, it was working with the FAA and another contractor to “identify instances where Starlink could serve as a long-term infrastructure upgrade for aviation safety.”
It may mean something — or not! — that Starlink never came up last night when Trump’s highly qualified Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy talked about airline safety with former Fox News coworker Laura Ingraham. He said the administration plans to “radically transform the way air traffic control looks,” and it’s going to be terrific, just the best, although we’ll have to wait for the details until Thursday. Duffy has never worked in transportation or IT, but he is ON TOP of this problem, he said.
“We’re going to build a brand-new air traffic control system — from new telecom, to new radars, to new infrastructure. We’re bringing on new air traffic controllers. […] This has been a problem in the decades coming, and we’re going to fix it.”
Even though he acknowledged the FAA’s problems have been building for decades, Duffy did take time to blame Joe Biden for all of it, claiming, “This should have been dealt with in the last administration; they did nothing.” And then the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and that 2023 FAA modernization contract with Verizon did not burst into the studio to say “What the fuck do you mean, ‘nothing’?” because they are pieces of paper, not people.
Duffy claimed that the ATC blackout lasted only 30 seconds, and was caused when the “primary communication line went down [and] the backup line didn’t fire,” but explained that there was no danger because once everything was fixed, the FAA slowed down traffic at Newark, just like any driver who’s suddenly unable to see would never ever be in trouble, like if “you’re driving down the road at 70 mph and you get white paint in your windshield, you slow down.” He didn’t explain how you’d be just peachy while driving blind for 90 seconds, even if you hit the brakes.
Ingraham came dangerously close to doing a journalism, pressing Duffy to explain why two flights had to abort landings at DC National Thursday because an Army helicopter carrying an as-yet unidentified VIP took a “scenic route” so the VIP could see the Pentagon from the air. That was despite flight restrictions on operations in the area following the crash in January. Duffy said he wants to find out who that VIP was, so they can presumably be fired as part of the ongoing purge of military leadership.
“Who do these generals think they are?” he asked plaintively. Ingraham asked Duffy why he hasn’t called Secretary Daydrunk, and he said that was a good idea, maybe she should call him, and she picked up a cell phone but didn’t call him, possibly to avoid one of his Signal chats. Don’t worry, if the VIP turns out to be Hegseth, we’re sure they’ll fire even MORE generals for letting that happen.
Anyway, Duffy is going to fix the 40-year problem real good, and maybe Elon will, or not, depending on who Trump talks to between now and Thursday.
[CNBC / New York / Daily Beast / Reuters / The Hill]
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“We’re going to build a brand-new air traffic control system — from new telecom, to new radars, to new infrastructure."
Anyone who's worked in I.T. knows how well re-writes go.
Long ago when learning about Stage Management we did an exercise, comparing the job to ATC.
We had everyone in the studio, walking slowly in whatever direction they wanted. The designated person stood in the center of the room and told people to change direction. The only rule was people couldn't stop walking. You had to keep everyone from crashing into each other or the walls.
It was one of the hardest things I've ever tried to do, and very few of us could handle it for more than a few seconds. We should not be fucking around with ATC.
But this is only going to get worse.