Gov. Phil Murphy said today that he is reassured that flying to and from Newark Liberty International Airport is a safe proposition despite recent air traffic control equipment failures and staffing issues at one of the nation’s busiest airports.
“I don't believe, and I've heard no evidence on the contrary, that there's a safety issue,” Murphy told reporters following a groundbreaking event for Netflix Studios at Fort Monmouth.
“But there's just a huge mismatch in supply-demand in terms of the flights that take off and land in Newark and the manpower that could support that.”
On April 28, an outage at Newark Liberty caused air traffic control computer screens to go dark for roughly 60 to 90 seconds and also prevented the controllers from talking to aircraft during the outage.
On Monday, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Acting Federal Aviation Administration Administrator Chris Rocheleau reiterated during a Monday press conference that the airport is safe.
Additionally, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said on CBS News' Face the Nation this weekend that flights in and out of Newark are safe.
"It absolutely is safe at Newark and the entire country," Kirby said. "And the reason is, when these kind of outages happen, we train for them. We have back-up procedures. We have backups to backups to backups to keep the skies safe - which is always the No. 1 priority."
Delays continued at Newark Liberty International Airport on Monday night with average backups of more than 1.5 hours.
This time it wasn't caused by technical failures, but a shortage of air traffic controllers that has been made worse because several of them went on 45-day trauma leave after the first radar outage, according to FAA spokesperson Kristen Alsop.
Murphy expressed confidence that the matters are being handled “at the highest levels” with the Trump administration, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, airport operators and United Airlines.
He also applauded a recently installed software patch at the Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach Control facility that helps handle Newark Airport traffic.
“(Duffy) has a great long-term plan which I support in terms of finally investing in technology, finally hiring the manpower we need to hire,” Murphy said. “But we need a surge in manpower, in the near and immediate future.”
