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An emergency task force comprised of experts from Verizon (NYSE:VZ), L3Harris (NYSE:LHX) and the Federal Aviation Administration has been created to address the telecommunication issues that disrupted hundreds of flights at the Newark Liberty International Airport.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the team would work on fast-tracking the required fixes. “The goal is to add three new telecom connections between New York and Philadelphia. This will provide more high-speed reliability and redundancy so if one goes down, we are assured that the others will stand up.”
Duffy said in the last couple of weeks, the FAA replaced copper lines with fiber lines at the Newark, JFK and LaGuardia airports. “It’s going to take another week or two to be testing those lines before we flip the switch and make them live.”
The Department of Transportation will also convene a meeting on Wednesday with airlines that have flights at Newark, with the aim of having a manageable number of flights land at the airport.
The updates follow three incidents – on April 28, May 9 and May 11 – in which air traffic control guiding planes in and out of Newark faced telecom issues. The first two incidents involved 90-second outages, with controllers unable to contact planes.
After the second incident on May 9, the FAA implemented a software update that ensured that the backup line worked when the main line went down on May 11. Still, air traffic controllers shut down the airspace for 45 minutes “out of an abundance of caution,” Duffy said.