Transportation Secretary Duffy vows to ease woes at troubled Newark Airport

Dave Goldiner, New York Daily News on May 28, 2025

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Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy vowed Wednesday that improvements should significantly ease delays and safety concerns at troubled Newark Liberty Airport by the Fourth of July holiday.

After weeks of chaos and a shaky Memorial Day weekend at the major hub, Duffy claimed there is light at the end of the tunnel as a new runway nears completion, new fiber optic cable comes online and several newly trained air traffic controllers start work.

“Some have asked: Is it safe to travel by airplane? Duffy told reporters. “Absolutely yes. Of course it is.”

Limiting flights to 28 takeoffs and 28 departures an hour has allowed Newark to operate safely for now despite an understaffed air traffic control tower, he said. He predicted that a new runway that is under construction would be operational by mid-June, potentially allowing more flights to operate.

“We’ve slowed things down (but) as we finish the runway and train up more controllers, we’ll do another evaluation,” Duffy said. “We’ll see if we can increase those departures out of Newark when it’s appropriate.”

Duffy said 16 air traffic controllers are being trained to fill vacancies at the Philadelphia air traffic control center that controls Newark’s airspace, easing pressure on the system. He also said a new Verizon fiber optic cable would be online by the end of June and could replace an aging copper wire system that has repeatedly failed.

Newark has been troubled with delays and cancellations for weeks, as a shortage of air traffic controllers, aging technology and runway repairs have combined in disastrous fashion.

Technological breakdowns on April 28 and May 9 impacted Philadelphia air traffic controllers that control Newark’s air space, leaving controllers and pilots in the dark for up to 90 seconds.

Radar systems experienced a third glitch on May 11. A fourth outage knocked out radio communications for about two seconds on Monday, but the radar stayed online.

Even throttling flights has not put and end to chronic delays at the airport.

Newark Airport was again plagued by delays over Memorial Day weekend, with more than 150 flights in and 230 flights out delayed on Saturday, according to flight-tracking data.

That put EWR at No. 2 in the nation for delays, trailing only Denver International Airport, where storms disrupted operations.

The troubles were somewhat mitigated on Sunday, with a total of 132 flights — 78 arriving, 54 departing — delayed as of Sunday afternoon, according to flight-tracking website FlightAware.

Duffy said the improvements at Newark are just a Band-Aid for the nation’s aging air travel infrastructure. He called on Congress to fund an overhaul of the air traffic control system that could handle increased flights and drone traffic that is expected in coming decades, with a price tag of “tens of billions of dollars.”

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