Ground stops and delays wreaked havoc on over half a dozen airports in the Northeast for most of Monday, including all three major New York-area airports, due to a pair of equipment failures, officials said.
A circuit failure at Philadelphia’s Terminal Radar Approach Control led to loss of radio and radar equipment at John F. Kennedy International Airport, LaGuardia Airport, and Newark Liberty International Airport, FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford confirmed.
The Philadelphia, Teterboro, and Westchester County airports were also impacted by the circuit failure, the FAA added.
The outage, which first impacted flights beginning at 10 a.m., resulted in more than 1,000 flights being delayed or canceled in one of the busiest regions in the US already troubled by aging infrastructure.
The incident also came as 130 world leaders and dozens of ministers were arriving in New York for the annual United Nations General Assembly meeting.
Making matters worse, officials discovered that a newly built fiber optic backup system in New Jersey had been damaged by construction work.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said a fiber-optic line was cut during work on the nearby Amtrak rail line, which resulted in communication lines for Verizon also getting severed.
“This incident underscores the need for additional funding to modernize aging infrastructure and prevent disruptions like this in the future,” Duffy added.
It was not immediately clear when the fiber-optic backup was severed.
“Unfortunately, that circuit failed today,” Bedford said. “And when it went to flip into the backup, we discovered that the backup fiber had a break.”
By 6 p.m., officials confirmed that the lines were fixed and airport operations were getting back on track — but warned of residual delays.
“The telecom lines have been repaired, and all airport operations in the Northeast are resuming,” Duffy said in an update posted to X.
“It will take some time to clear all existing delays, so please check with your airline for the latest information.”
At the time of Duffy’s update, JFK, LaGuardia, Newark, Teterboro and Philadelphia were still experiencing significant hour-long delays.
The chaos delayed more than 600 flights at Newark and Philadelphia alone, according to the FlightAware flight-tracking site, with no signal yet as to when landings and takeoffs can resume.
A ground stop at Boston airport, which stopped accepting flights because of spillover volume, was also lifted.
Bedford railed against the existing infrastructure and warned of more outages in the future.
“The network design is terrible. And if we don’t fix the network design, we’re going to continue having these failures,” he said.
The region had seen troubles last year, leading to attempts to upgrade and overhaul the aging system.
“Today, the data architecture is the same,” Bedford said. “We’re pulling copper up and putting fiber down, but it’s the same data architecture that we’ve had for 50 years.”
Congress had approved $12.5 billion last year to update America’s air traffic control systems and boost air controller hirings to combat congestion and flight delays that have plagued the country’s airports in recent years.
