ABC News: Radar screens at Newark airport went black again overnight

[Dennis Donovan]

ABC News - Radar screens at Newark airport went black again overnight

The brief outage happened at 3:55 a.m.

By Sam Sweeney, Clara McMichael, and Ayesha Ali
May 9, 2025, 10:20 AM

Radar screens at New Jersey's Newark Liberty International Airport went black again early Friday morning.

The brief outage happened at 3:55 a.m.

Air traffic controllers could be heard telling a FedEx plane that their screens went dark and then asking the aircraft to tell their company to put pressure on to get the problem fixed.

In another transmission, a controller told an arriving private jet that the airport just had a brief radar outage and to stay at or above 3,000 feet in case the controllers couldn't get in touch during the aircraft's descent.

Last week, an outage at Newark caused ATC computer screens to go dark for roughly 60 to 90 seconds and prevented controllers from talking to aircraft during that time, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the incident. As a result, the Federal Aviation Administration briefly halted all departures to the airport.

/snip

[Passages]

1. Someone want to explain to me how this is not criminal negligence?

[hildegaard28]

4. They want

To blame Biden, but these things didn't start happening until Trump started letting Elon worm his way into the FAA.

[BoRaGard]

2. magat G.O.P has grossly weakened US air safety

in just a matter of months.

what arrogant dangerous wankers

[TexLaProgressive]

3. I'm curious as to what the "copper wire's" function was.

I don't doubt that the ATC systems are horribly obsolete, but even the latest state of the art electronics systems will have copper conductors. That's power, timing and signals.

The fact that the screens went black, it's likely that the radars were still functioning but something common to all radar displays. I admit I'm 50+ years from avionics but I did spend a lifetime as an electronics technician. My grandson repairs and maintenance ground and weather radar systems for the USAF. He'd know more about how these systems are interfaced to the control towers.

[Beck23]

6. Maybe DOGE fired those who knew how things work

[LastDemocratInSC]

8. I read that the copper connection is between Newark airport

and the TRACON facility in Philadelphia and the specific issue was that radar data was getting from/to both facility.

[TexLaProgressive]

9. If so I suppose the upgrade would be fiber optic cable.

That comes with its own complications. There's a need for fiber terminals at both ends. Hopefully the upgrade will at least be duplex, 2 terminals at each end and 2 cable routes.

This is what I thought about the 780 Max, relying on a single stall sensor.

I think that they were using T3/DS3 transport the radar data over a cable with multiple 75 ohm coax. Depending on the length there would need to be repeaters to keep the signal up. The DC riding to power the repeaters may have caused the problem by burning the wire(s).

This can also be an issue with FO. DC is carried on dedicated metallic wires to power repeater. Duplex systems are expensive but really needed on critical systems.

We have a class 5 fiber optic hub in our town. The power from the grid come from 2 parts of the network, they have 3 1.5 mega megawatt generators that can each run the site alone. They are fueled by a tank like carried by large tank trucks. All the equipment is duplex meaning 2 systems operating together with one active with the other able take over without a pause if the active side fails.

[Beck23]

5. They are trying to frame this as a technology issue

But there is also a staffing issue due to DOGE cuts.

[tonekat]

7. This is Russian Roulette

And if these incidents continue, their luck will run out.