WASHINGTON — Flight delays and cancellations are bound to only get “worse” heading into the summer, members of Congress warned Wednesday — as Federal Aviation Administration officials said it’ll take another year or more to update aging infrastructure and complete recruitment for controllers.
This year, the tragic mid-air collision that killed 67 people at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Washington, DC, a spate of frightening near-misses and a 90-second communications blackout in Newark have only added to the urgency as Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy seeks to overhaul the nation’s air travel.
“We have been rightfully focused on the tragedy, the loss of life, with the American Airlines flight,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said in a Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee hearing with FAA officials Wednesday.
“But as pointed out by my colleagues, so many problems at Newark, and as I go into the summer season, it’s hard to believe that they won’t get worse — and then just across the country,” added Klobuchar, highlighting another near-miss involving a flight en route to Minneapolis in March.
The FAA is still short roughly 3,000 air traffic controllers and in the process of updating copper telecommunications wires for a brand-new fiber-optic network, while Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy plans a hiring blitz and pledges billions of dollars will go toward overhauling systems.
The current copper wire system is causing “almost 1,000 outages a week,” one airline industry official previously told The Post.
But the recruiting won’t be finished and infrastructure won’t be fully in place for at least another year or more, FAA officials confirmed in the hearing.
“Congress and the administration must think boldly about how we can set the FAA up for long-term success,” said Chairman Ted Cruz (R-Texas). “Both our economy’s productive capacity and the safety of the nation’s airspace depend on it.”
Air Traffic Organization deputy COO Franklin McIntosh revealed in an exchange with Klobuchar that the agency is only on track to hire 2,000 air traffic controllers by the end of this year — despite being “3,000 short.”
“We have to account for attrition,” McIntosh said. “I think we’ll finally start gaining traction this year, where we outpace attrition. And then we’ll start seeing over the next 18 to 24 months where we actually see a positive gain in the controllers.”
Meanwhile, flight delays and cancellations to maintain standards of safety will remain an issue — while hopefully being able to “prevent more Newark-type failures,” said Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), the top Democrat on the panel.
A fried piece of copper wire — and a failed backup wire — caused radar and comms to go dark for 90 seconds as controllers were overseeing flights at Newark Liberty International Airport on April 28, prompting cancellations and delays for more than a week.
“Newark International Airport has been beset by delays after the radar system malfunctioned,” Cruz said in the hearing before demanding answers about how the blackout occurred.
At least four FAA controllers at the Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach Control, or TRACON, also took federal “trauma leave” of up to 45 days, an airline industry insider told The Post.
“Ninety seconds is a long time for an air traffic controller,” noted McIntosh in the hearing. “We haven’t had a failure like this — to this degree — in my memory.”
Duffy has vowed to upgrade the Philly TRACON with the modern Standard Terminal Automation Replacement System (STARS), and McIntosh in a line of questioning from Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ) agreed that a “conservative” estimate would have that in place in the next six to 12 months.
On top of that, Kim said staff at the TRACON told him last weekend just 22 of their expected 32 certified professional controllers were working at the Philadelphia site — and more were expected to leave temporary duty at the facility by July 28.
McIntosh added that at least six were going to join after finishing training in a simulation lab by June, another 10 controllers were “actively training” and “every training class that I have signed up through the middle of 2026 is filled with CPC-ITs [certified professional controller-intermediate training personnel].”
“My pipeline is actually robust,” he said, disputing Kim hearing from controllers at the facility that their numbers were dwindling into “the single digits.”
At least 10,791 certified professional controllers (CPCs) work at the FAA in 300 facilities monitoring more than 45,000 flights per day.
New York City airspaces suffer around 75% of all delays nationwide, the leading trade association Airlines for America noted in a letter to the FAA in April.
“The FAA must recruit, train and retain the best and brightest,” added FAA acting Associate Administrator for Aviation Safety Jodi Baker in the hearing.
“The FAA is laser focused on air traffic controllers and aviation safety inspectors. We are updating controllers staffing targets across facilities.”
