Ground stops and delays wreaked havoc on over half a dozen airports in the Northeast on Monday, including all three major New York-area airports, due to a pair of equipment failures – and it could take 13 hours to fix, 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 incident resulted in more than 92 flight cancellations and over 70 diversions in one of the busiest regions in the US already troubled by aging infrastructure.
Making matters worse, officials discovered that a newly built fiber optic backup system in New Jersey had been damaged by construction work.
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.”
Officials confirmed that JFK and LaGuardia were up and running again just before 2 p.m., but systems were still down in Newark and Philadelphia.
The FAA boss added that it could take at least 13 more hours for the backup systems to be fixed as he slammed the mess as a technical issue that needs to be addressed.
“The network design is terrible. And if we don’t fix the network design, we’re going to continue having these failures,” he warned.
An initial attempt to replace the circuit at fault did not work, Bedford added.
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.”
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