Travellers flying through Newark Liberty International Airport in May 2025 faced hundreds of flight cancellations and long delays after a radar failure and a serious shortage of air traffic controllers brought the airport close to gridlock. Newark handles around 400 flights a day and is the main hub of United Airlines, and the disruptions caused chaos for tens of thousands of passengers during one of the busiest travel periods of the year.
The crisis began on 28 April 2025, when the radar and radio communications system at the Philadelphia air traffic control facility that manages flights into and out of Newark suffered a sudden failure. For approximately 90 seconds, controllers lost the ability to see aircraft on their radar screens. For around one minute, they were also unable to communicate with pilots by radio. During this time, between 15 and 20 aircraft were in the air and being managed by the facility. No accidents occurred, but the incident was deeply alarming for the controllers involved.
In the days that followed, five members of the control team — including one supervisor, three controllers, and one trainee — took 45-day trauma leave after the experience of losing contact with aircraft mid-flight. This immediately removed around one fifth of the experienced staff responsible for Newark’s airspace. Even before the incident, the facility had been significantly understaffed: only 22 controllers were certified and working, against the FAA’s recommended level of 38. With five more now on leave, the airport’s air traffic management was stretched to a dangerous degree.
The result was severe disruption for passengers. On 5 May 2025 alone, 160 flights were cancelled and 375 were delayed at Newark. United Airlines, which operates more than 70 percent of flights at the airport, cancelled 35 roundtrip services per day starting from 4 May and offered passengers the ability to rebook without fees for travel between 6 and 23 May. In total, more than 1,400 delays and cancellations were attributed to the crisis over the peak weeks of disruption.
On 20 May, the FAA issued a formal order capping the number of arrivals and departures at Newark at 56 per hour, below the airport’s normal operating rate, in order to manage the reduced capacity of the control facility. The situation was made worse by ongoing runway construction at Newark, which further reduced the number of aircraft that could land and take off at the same time.
The Newark crisis was not an isolated problem. At the time, around 91 percent of US air traffic control facilities were operating below the FAA’s recommended staffing levels, and the agency estimated a nationwide shortage of approximately 3,000 controllers. Training a new controller takes between 18 months and three years, meaning there was no quick fix available. The FAA acknowledged that the problems at Newark would not be resolved quickly, and extended the operational cap through the remainder of 2025 and into 2026.
Key vocabulary:
- air traffic controller – a trained specialist responsible for directing aircraft in the air and on the ground, using radar and radio to ensure safe separation between flights at all times
- radar – a system that uses radio waves to detect and track the position and speed of aircraft; air traffic controllers rely on radar screens to monitor all flights in their area
- trauma leave – time off work granted to an employee who has experienced a psychologically distressing event; in aviation, controllers who lose contact with aircraft may be eligible for paid leave to recover
- certified controller – an air traffic controller who has completed all required training and examinations for a specific facility and is fully qualified to control traffic there independently
- operational cap – an official limit on the number of flights allowed to arrive or depart from an airport within a given time period, imposed when capacity — runway, terminal, or staffing — is reduced
- roundtrip – a flight that travels from one destination to another and then returns to the starting point; cancelling a roundtrip removes both the outbound and return journey from the schedule
CEFR Level B1-B2 / ICAO Level 4-5