Chaos at major airport as ground stop halts ALL planes just weeks after tech meltdown
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Flights at New Jersey's Newark Airport have been grounded on Wednesday due to staffing issues.
A ground stop was briefly ordered then a ground delay was put in effect until 10:59 p.m. ET, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
The FAA's Air Traffic Control System Command Center said due to staffing problems at the travel hub, a traffic management program has been put in place for arriving flights causing delays by an average of 27 minutes.
'If daily or per-shift staffing levels are low, the FAA ensures safety by implementing traffic management initiatives, such as slowing the flow of aircraft into an airport,' the FAA told DailyMail.com.
Delays have been assigned to departures within 1000 nautical miles of the airport and includes all contiguous US departures.
The chaos comes as Newark Airport has been plagued by delays and cancellations for months.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy held a news conference at the airport on Monday to announce the reopening of a major runway nearly two weeks ahead of schedule.
The ongoing delays have been caused by air traffic control outages, runway construction, and the fact that over 20 percent of FAA controllers at Newark walked off the job, among other factors.
Since April 28, there have been three power outages that left radar screens dark while air traffic controllers were directly planes in the air along the East Coast.
The Federal Aviation Administration released a statement on X, revealing the blackout was caused by a 'telecommunications outage' at Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) Area C.
This control center, located 90 miles away at the Philadelphia International Airport, has been managing air traffic for Newark Airport since July 2024 because of staffing shortages in the New York-New Jersey region.
However, connection issues led to April 28's 90-second blackout, as well as two more radar outages on May 9 and May 11.
All of the incidents caused ground stops at Newark and led to hundreds of delays and cancelled flights.
A 'fried' piece of copper wiring momentarily wiped out their radar and radio feeds on May 9 - leaving planes flying blind into one of the world's busiest airports.
FAA planners dismissed the doomsday scenario as an 'extremely remote' possibility when they relocated controllers to a new site in Philadelphia last year.
But an internal report leaked to DailyMail.com suggests senior officials had ample warning that the regulator's antiquated communications system was on the brink of collapse.
The confidential document lists multiple occasions when a dozen or more tower displays failed in eerily similar circumstances across Southern California in 2022 and 2023.
A national safety panel determined the culprit was congested ethernet cabling that couldn't cope with the volume of data traveling between radars and towers.
Ominously, the report concluded that the danger wasn't unique to California because the FAA relies upon the same decades-old tech across the entire country.
Officials insisted that they could mitigate the 'high risk hazard' by installing software patches and having staffers manually monitor the signal.
After the April 28 radar blackout, officials with United Airlines claimed that more than 20 percent of Newark's tower controllers allegedly 'walked off the job.'
Officially, several of the air traffic controllers used their 'trauma leave' following the radar blackout last month.
Under the Federal Employees Compensation Act, government workers who experience work-related injuries or illnesses, including psychological trauma or stress-related conditions, are able to take up to 45 days off at full pay.
The Trump administration said it's been trying to 'supercharge' the air traffic controller workforce and make moves to address the nation's shortage of controllers.
Since the beginning of 2025, at least 166 people have died in 50 US aviation incidents, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.
Trump vowed to purge DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion – from U.S. aviation, among other federal agencies, in the wake of the deadly midair collision at Reagan National airport in January that claimed 67 lives .
