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FAA: Brief radio outage at air traffic control facility responsible for Newark Airport flights

The outage occurred Monday morning, and operations are back to normal, according to the FAA.

Naomi Yané and William Aguirre

May 20, 2025, 12:46 AM

Updated 1 hr ago

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Operations are back to normal at Newark Airport after another radio outage at the air traffic control station responsible for flights in and out of Newark.
The FAA is investigating after a two-second radio outage.
“Operations are normal after Philadelphia TRACON Area C lost radio frequencies for approximately two seconds around 11:35 a.m. local time on Monday, May 19. All aircraft remained safely separated," the FAA said in a statement.
This latest outage comes on the heels of several other equipment failures out of the air traffic control station Philadelphia TRACON Area C, which is responsible for flights in and out of Newark Liberty.
On May 11, there was an air traffic control equipment outage that lasted 45 minutes, on May 9 and April 28, the airport experienced telecommunications outages where air traffic controllers lost contact with planes.
Kevin Soto flew out of Newark last week and experienced some of the delays caused by those incidents firsthand.
"They informed me early in the morning that there’d be a one-hour delay, and then I got here and then there were three other delays... so I ended up being here six hours," Soto said.
Airline leaders and the FAA met last week to discuss lowering the number of flights at Newark - the agency proposed a maximum of 28 flights an hour until next month.