An air traffic control radio outage has grounded all inbound flights to Newark Liberty Airport in New Jersey.
Incoming flights from across the US and Canada will be slowed down, with average delays of as long as 2.5 hours and some nearly four hours.
Departing flights did not appear to be impacted.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said the outage is due to an equipment issue, causing air traffic controller to lose their radio frequencies.
The alert affects flights arriving between August 28 at 12:22pm ET and August 29 at 11:59pm.
Travelers have shared their frustrations on social media, some saying their flight has been delayed three times within 15 minutes.
The flight chaos comes as the busy Labor Day travel weekend is getting underway, and the Newark airport is expecting more than three million passengers over the holiday.
‘Traveling this weekend? It’s going to be busy,’ wrote the Newark Airport in a post on X, recommending that travelers budget extra time to arrive, park, check in and get through security. The airport has not acknowledged the current outage.
This is a developing story… More updates to come.
Incoming flights from across the US and Canada will be slowed down, with average delays of as long as 2.5 hours, with some nearly four hours. Departing flights did not appear to be impacted
This is the second outage in the past 24 hours affecting controllers at the Philadelphia ATC center, which manages Newark airspace.
The first occurred on Wednesday between 6:30pm and 7:30pm, when audio briefly failed, making communication between planes and controllers unclear.
The FAA last year relocated control of the Newark airspace area to Philadelphia to address staffing and congested New York City area traffic.
A similar issue hit the airport in May, which led the FAA to admit that its ‘antiquated air traffic control system is affecting our workforce.’
