In July of 2024, the Biden/Buttigieg FAA moved control of the New York/Newark airspace from New York, also known as N90, to Philadelphia Tower, or the Philadelphia TRACON [Terminal Radar Approach Control Facility].
As part of the move, the STARS [Standard Terminal Automation Replacement System] system that processes radar data for Newark remained based in New York City. They didn't move it from New York down to Philly, where the controllers would be. Redundant and diverse telecommunications lines feed this data from New York to Philadelphia TRACON, where controllers handle New York arrivals and departures.
The Biden/Buttigieg bungled this move without properly hardening the telecom lines feeding the data, which was already well known to be error-prone. Without addressing the underlying infrastructure, they added more risk to the system. In fact, there were issues in October and November under Biden and Buttigieg that would have highlighted to the prior Administration that the underlying hardware would continue to cause problems. //
The incidents on April 28th and May 9th resulted in very brief outages that impacted the STARS radar data displays going down. The most serious of these outages lasted approximately 30 seconds. This includes the STARS radar data displays going down, again, for 30 seconds. The STARS displays took approximately 60 seconds, then, to reboot and come back online.
So there's been some discrepancy, 30 seconds versus 90 seconds.
The outage was 30 seconds, but then the displays took another minute to boot. That's where you get 30 and 90 seconds, but the telecom was out for 30 seconds.
The outage also interrupted the phone line and radio frequencies for a very short period. This is how controllers talk to pilots....These frequencies returned almost immediately, which is why you heard pilots actually telling airplanes that they couldn't see them with the radar. //
On Friday night [May 8] the FAA implemented a software update to prevent future outages. The software patch was successful, and our redundant lines are now both working. We know this because on Sunday there was an outage -- you all reported on that -- and the outage was -- the main line went down, but the redundant line did stand up, meaning our patch, our fix worked.
Now...the controllers who had seen this the prior two times, when they saw the main line go down, they were concerned. Even though they could see airplanes and talk to airplanes, out of an abundance of caution they actually shut down the airspace for 45 minutes, but we still had our scopes and our telecom functioning on Sunday morning.
