Trump administration Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Sunday morning that it is safe to fly out of Newark Airport even though there have been two radar outages and a ground stop there in the last two weeks.
A 45-minute ground stop was put in place around 12:30 a.m. Sunday that was still causing brief delays (about 19 minutes per flight) on Monday morning.
The ground stop was due to malfunctioning telecommunications equipment at the Philadelphia Airport that affected Newark. Redundancies were followed successfully, but the ground stop was meant to slow things down to make sure that happened.
The incident followed 90-second radar outages on April 18 and May 9, which caused major delays even though the May 9 outage happened at 3:55 a.m.
Duffy said the number of flights into and out of Newark would be reduced for several weeks while the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) investigated the incidents.
"I fly out of Newark all the time. My family flies out of Newark," Duffy said. "And just when we saw these two incidents… when we have issues, there are policies and procedures in place for controllers and for pilots. They know what to do. It is not ideal, by any stretch."
Duffy said more money is needed to update outdated equipment and air traffic control towers.
'We have to fix it, though. This is an American issue, and it's going to be an American congressional priority, I think, in this coming year, to get us the money to do the three or four-year build that it's going to take to get this completed,' he said.
Duffy admitted to NBC News that he was "concerned" about the conditions of air space all over the country.
"I'm concerned about the whole airspace, right?' he said. "The equipment that we use, much of it we can't buy parts for new. We have to go on eBay and buy parts if one part goes down. You're dealing with really old equipment. We're dealing with copper wires, not fiber, not high-speed fiber. And so this is concerning."
He felt that the system was still safe for now because of redundancies, but that it should be fixed as soon as possible before it becomes too outdated to fix.
"We have redundancies, multiple redundancies in place to keep you safe when you fly," Duffy insisted. "But we should also recognize we're seeing stress on an old network, and it's time to fix it."
Duffy understood that reducing flights through Newark would impact travelers in New York, America's largest city.
"I hate delays," he admitted, but said it was a matter of safety, and that was more important.
