Transportation secretary calls Newark safe as outage hits airport again

Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy said it is still safe to fly from Newark Liberty International Airport, but flights to the beleaguered facility need to be scaled back after air traffic control systems suffered several outages, including the latest Sunday.

“I fly out of Newark all the time,” Duffy said on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” in an interview aired Sunday. “My family flies out of Newark.”

Duffy, who has been tasked with overhauling the Federal Aviation Administration’s aging infrastructure and understaffed corps of air traffic controllers as a deadly plane crash in Washington and weeks of delays and cancellations have rattled trust in the nation’s airways, said the United States remains the “safest airspace.”

Newark has seen hundreds of delayed and canceled flights, and several technical issues in recent weeks, including early Friday when radar systems at Newark stopped working for about 90 seconds. In late April, five air traffic controllers took trauma leave after a similar incident where controllers briefly lost contact with aircraft.

The issues at Newark resurfaced Sunday morning when the FAA issued a 45-minute ground stop due to a communications issue with the Philadelphia facility that handles Newark’s air traffic, kicking off more delays.

Newark’s situation is “not ideal by any stretch,” Duffy said, but he added that air traffic controllers and pilots have backup procedures to handle system outages.

Duffy said Newark would operate at reduced capacity for “several weeks” to avoid further delays, and that he was meeting with all airlines that fly out of Newark to coordinate the reduction. He did not say how many flights would be reduced from the airport’s schedule, but said reductions would fluctuate and could be concentrated in afternoons when international flights arrive.

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby, whose airline uses Newark as a hub, said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that reductions at the airport will “probably go through the summer.” Kirby said earlier this month that United was canceling 35 round-trip flights per day from the airport.

Authorities plan to upgrade the infrastructure connecting Newark to its Philadelphia air traffic control facility, which could take until the end of the summer, Duffy said.

Duffy and Kirby have pinned Newark’s issues on aging equipment and a chronic shortage of air traffic controllers, problems that Duffy said affect airports across the country. Earlier this month, Duffy announced a package to boost the hiring and retention of air traffic controllers and plans to overhaul the country’s air traffic control system by replacing old communications systems and building new control centers.

“We’re seeing stress on an old network, and it’s time to fix it,” Duffy said.

Duffy also denied that Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service, which has cut employees across the federal government, including at the FAA, worsened the situation.

The FAA has continued hiring air traffic controllers and none were cut by DOGE – which stands for Department of Government Efficiency – Duffy said, and “most” probationary workers targeted in the cuts have since returned. Musk did not ask Duffy to cut air traffic controllers from the FAA, he said.

“Elon and I get along really well,” Duffy said. “He never called me and said, ‘Cut air traffic control.’ He would never do that.”