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Air Traffic, Out of Control?
CNN One Thing
May 11, 2025
The Department of Transportation announced it will build a “brand new air traffic control system” by 2029. It follows more than a week of massive delays and cancellations at Newark Liberty International Airport sparked by a frightening communications blackout. We look at the plan for the new system and hear from a former air traffic controller who says government funding is at the heart of the problem.
Guest: Michael McCormick, Air Traffic Management Program Coordinator at Embry‑Riddle Aeronautical University & Alexandra Skores, CNN Transportation Reporter
Have a question about the news? Have a story you think we should cover? Call us at 202-240-2895.
Episode Transcript
David Rind
00:00:00
Little public service announcement for you. You might want to check your driver's license because new rules that kicked in on Wednesday mean if you're using it to fly domestically, things will go a lot smoother if it's real ID compliant. Now you won't be turned away if you show up to the airport with an old license, but you may be subject to additional screening. So make an appointment at your DMV if you can get one. But for those traveling through Newark Liberty International Airport over the last week or so, a driver's license was the least of their concerns.
Kaitlan Collins
00:00:32
Newark Airport in New Jersey is in total meltdown right now with delays still facing the airport cancelations as well.
Brynn Gingras
00:00:39
If you have a flight in or out of Newark that hasn't been delayed or canceled, go outside, buy a lottery ticket right now because that's all we're seeing on
David Rind
00:00:46
'Now these weren't run-of-the-mill weather delays. The actual cause was much scarier.
Jake Tapper
00:00:51
Air traffic controllers at Newark International Airport in New Jersey were quote traumatized after equipment failures cut off communication with planes two weeks ago and now five controllers are out on paid leave.
Anderson Cooper
00:01:03
One air traffic controller on duty that day tells CNN it was the most dangerous situation you could have.
Kyung Lah
00:01:09
And this tech failure wasn't the only one. It happened multiple times within the last year.
David Rind
00:01:19
'So between this, the deadly mid-air collision in Washington DC earlier this year, and numerous near misses at airports across the country, some people are asking, just how safe is it to fly right now? Today, a former air traffic controller explains why tech issues aren't the only problem facing the industry, and CNN transportation reporter Alexandra Skores tells us what the Trump administration plans to do about it. From CNN, this is One Thing. I'm David Rind.
David Rind
00:01:56
This mess all started on April 28th.
Air Traffic Control Audio
00:01:59
Under 1951, Toronto 160, speed 181 level.
David Rind
00:02:03
Air traffic controllers in Philadelphia were guiding planes to Newark when all of a sudden they lost contact with those planes.
Air Traffic Control Audio
00:02:10
Contact Tower, United, four two. Say United, 1951.
David Rind
00:02:16
Pilots were trying to reach the tower.
Air Traffic Control Audio
00:02:19
United or New York. United 1951,.
David Rind
00:02:21
No answer.
Air Traffic Control Audio
00:02:22
'Unite in I-561D here.
David Rind
00:02:25
They kept trying and trying.
Air Traffic Control Audio
00:02:27
Approach you there.
David Rind
00:02:29
Literal radio silence.
Air Traffic Control Audio
00:02:31
Radio, 1951, how do you hear me? I got you loud and clear now, you're 99251. Okay, turn right, direct to the...
David Rind
00:02:38
Eventually, coms came back up, but there were still big problems.
Air Traffic Control Audio
00:02:42
Go to United 674, we lost radar contact lost, we've lost our radar.
David Rind
00:02:48
Radar had gone down.
Air Traffic Control Audio
00:02:50
Do I have Bravo clearance? No, you do not have a Bravo clearance. We lost our radar and it's not working correctly. Radar service...
David Rind
00:02:56
According to a source with knowledge of the situation, for at least 90 seconds, controllers lost the ability to see planes on radar scopes and for a minute they could not communicate with pilots.
Air Traffic Control Audio
00:03:08
I'll wait for that frequency from you, okay? Okay, no, just walk me as far, look up the tower frequencies, and we don't have a radar, so I don't know where you are.
Michael McCormick
00:03:19
Going with their heads would be the first and most important thing. How do I gain control of communication and surveillance to protect the safety and integrity?
David Rind
00:03:33
'Airspace System. Michael McCormick was an air traffic controller at the Federal Aviation Administration for 33 years. Now he's the coordinator of the air traffic management program at Embry-Brittle Aeronautical University. Well, so an air-traffic controller who was present that day told my colleague Pete Matine that five FAA employees took 45 days of trauma leave after the outage. Now, I think some people might hear about screens going blank for, you know, less than two minutes and say, hey, that's not really that traumatic. It happens to my iPad sometimes. And now this facility though has five less employees to deal with all of this. So can you explain why these folks would have wanted to take this leave after something like this?
Michael McCormick
00:04:16
Flight controllers going out on traumatic leave is driven by not only the stressors of that event, but there had also been intermittent outages over several months leading up to this. So as that stress and as that frustration builds over time, and then you get into an event where you lose both radio and radar, that's challenging. Your heart is going to race and you're going to struggle to come up with what is it that I need to do to keep things safe. And that is traumatic. This isn't your iPad. This isn' your laptop. This is aircraft moving at speeds in excess of 200 miles an hour and converging. So, time and second...
David Rind
00:05:12
'A source tells CNN that the outage was the result of a failure of copper wiring that transmits information from a facility in New York to that Newark Approach Tower in Philadelphia. Now, if that setup sounds antiquated and unnecessarily complicated, I'm right there with you. But McCormick insists the front-facing equipment that controllers use is safe. It's the behind-the-scenes infrastructure that has not been updated. And he says, at the heart of the problem is funding allocated by Congress, which forces the FAA to prioritize what they can and cannot do with that pool of money, which includes hiring new controllers.
Michael McCormick
00:05:51
Where there is a government shutdown, it means that the FAA cannot hire or train new air traffic controllers. And then what happens during the shutdown, however, is that controllers continue to atrid out, retire, and leave. So it compounds itself. You're losing controllers and you're not hiring controllers. And then we had the pandemic. Well, when you go a year and you can't hire anybody you lose the 1200 controllers then you also lose the controllers who are going to retire out of the system. So that brings us to where we are today, where there's a shortage of over 3,000 archival controllers in the Federal Aviation Administration.
David Rind
00:06:33
Are you seeing less interest or less folks coming into your program? Oh, not at all.
Michael McCormick
00:06:39
There was tremendous interest in becoming an air traffic controller. And I would support that. Air traffic control is a fantastic profession. It's a great career field. And on top of that, it pays extremely well. The medium income is one hundred fifty thousand dollars a year.
David Rind
00:06:56
But I can't imagine these headlines and these descriptions of some of the work conditions that folks are facing. I imagine that's not going to make it sound that great to folks though, right?
Michael McCormick
00:07:06
I can tell you that my students are very, very eager to join the profession. They are not impacted by the press or anything. In fact, they look forward to becoming a solution to the staffing shortages. Just this past week was graduation, but prior to graduation, I had a cadre of students who took the written evaluation and the performance evaluation for becoming our traffic controller. Under a new program from the FAA, where they completely bypass the FIA Academy and they get to do their security clearance and medical clearance prior to graduation. So now these contrary students are eligible to be part, immediately part of the Controversial Workforce and the Federal Aviation Administration and they're ready to go.
David Rind
00:07:56
I guess finally, is it safe to fly right now? Is it crazy to even be asking that question?
Michael McCormick
00:08:03
Yes, it's crazy to be asking that question. Without a doubt, aviation remains the safest form of transportation in the United States by far. If you're going to go someplace, the greatest risk that you take is getting in your Uber or getting in a car and going to the airport. That's riskier than 1,000 tons of riskier than actually getting on board the aircraft. The Federal Aviation Administration prioritizes safety before anything else. And if necessary, they will throttle down the demand in order to ensure safe levels. So even if Congress doesn't act like I wish they would act, or even if the funding isn't available for personnel or infrastructure, the FAA has the tools in place where they can bring that demand down to the level of safety that's necessary for the system. It would be inefficient and would cause delays, but it would be safe.
David Rind
00:09:06
Cause delays and less flight options for customers, but like you say, the trade off is safety.
00:09:15
When we come back, CNN's Alexandra Skores tells us what the Department of Transportation is actually planning to do about the problems at Newark and the rest of America's airports.
00:09:37
Okay, Alexandra, so you cover transportation for CNN, and in light of this crazy incident with radar and communications at Newark, I'm wondering, how did it get to a place where something like that could happen?
Alexandra Skores
00:09:49
'Right. For decades, the FAA has had this problem, and you can't really pinpoint it on one administration. It's been a problem for decades. At the bottom line, we have aging technology, the infrastructure that air traffic controllers use. It's stuff that's been, you know, 50, 60 years old. Wow. There's radios that air-traffic controllers use that, you now, are 50,60 years old, their voice switches, the radars that they use are from the 70s and 80s. So, a lot of this stuff that, you know, is vital to your job, it's almost unusable. And the main talking point amongst transportation officials, and in particular, Secretary Sean Duffy, is the fact that they're still using copper wires in their telecommunications. And that's essentially what went wrong with Newark. We know that, copper wires, nobody's really using that anymore. They need to modernize. And that's been kind of the key talking point.
David Rind
00:10:48
Right, so what's the plan to fix all of it?
Alexandra Skores
00:10:52
That's the big question, right, is how do we fix this?
Sean Duffy Transportation Secretary
00:10:58
Hello everybody, welcome to our press conference on air traffic control.
Alexandra Skores
00:11:03
On Thursday, the DOT announced this new massive plan for a brand new air traffic control system. That includes 25,000 new radios, 475 new voice switches, they're talking new, new,
Sean Duffy Transportation Secretary
00:11:19
We're gonna have new telecom, new fiber throughout the system. We're going to have brand new radios in our towers to communicate between air traffic controllers and with airplanes.
David Rind
00:11:31
Alright, so the plan is literally to rip out everything and replace it.
Alexandra Skores
00:11:35
To some degree, yes, you know, it's either taking things or revamping them or just, you know, completely replacing it because you have to do out with the old.
Sean Duffy Transportation Secretary
00:11:42
The system we have here, it's not worth saving. I don't need to preserve any of this. It's too old. You got a 1967 Volkswagen Beetle that you're using for transportation. I don' want to preserve the Beetle. I actually want to build a brand new car.
David Rind
00:12:02
I mean, I'm sure that most people that work with this stuff would agree, and it sounds great, but how long is it gonna take?
Alexandra Skores
00:12:09
It's going to be a three to four year plan and it's pretty ambitious.
David Rind
00:12:13
Three to four years?!
Alexandra Skores
00:12:14
Three to four years, and, you know, that's one of the things that my colleague Pete Monteen and I kind of questioned the secretary on. How do you implement such a robust plan within the short period of time?
Sean Duffy Transportation Secretary
00:12:26
If you're clear visioned and you have a clear plan and you engage companies at the CEO level and get them to commit that this mission is going to be a priority for their company and they're going to move as fast and safely as possible, that's where I tell you it's three to four years. Now I'll tell you, it's probably closer to four than three, but that's having the whole project complete.
Alexandra Skores
00:12:49
It takes an act of Congress, I think that's another critical point.
Sean Duffy Transportation Secretary
00:12:52
Do you have a number in mind? A number of three or four years. Spend. Does it matter? Oh, the money matters. I'll just say that it's going to be tens of billions of dollars. We have an idea of what it's gonna cost. I need the Congress to look at this. Listen, these committees do this really well. I want them to look what I want in a line by line of what we need and pressure test what they think the number should be.
Alexandra Skores
00:13:22
He hasn't laid a dollar amount on how much this is going to cost. He estimates in the tens of billions, but it's going to take members both sides of the aisle to kind of weigh in on the transportation matters and see where we can meet on, you know, getting this system in place because we don't have 20 plus years to change the system. It needs to be done almost today.
David Rind
00:13:46
So Congress being involved, obviously that complicates things quite a bit, and I've heard President Trump blame the previous administration, like Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden for not implementing some of these fixes before, is there any truth to that?
Alexandra Skores
00:14:00
It's a decades old problem, you know, you can't really pin it on one administration. It's a matter of kind of getting the right people in the right place. And that's what we saw at the press conference at DOT. All of the airline CEOs, members of Congress, different trade groups, people that have a stake in the game were all present because they know how critical of an issue this is.
David Rind
00:14:24
Well, so this plan is extremely bold. It's not going to happen anytime, particularly soon. So in the meantime, I guess I'm wondering about other airports. If this equipment really is all throughout the system, this decades old stuff, like Newark happens to be my home airport. So like I'm a little invested here, but beyond that, I know people are all over the country and have to fly out of all these various places. So what are experts saying about if these. Towers are vulnerable to similar things like we've seen at Newark.
Alexandra Skores
00:14:56
Yeah, the expert sources that I've spoken to have echoed similar things. Now, they've said Newark is probably the exception. It's probably the worst at Newark right now, but it's not unlikely that you see scenarios similar to what happened at Nework at other airports. This, again, is decades old technology, and it's going to take a while to fix it. And it's gonna take Congress, it's gonna take the administration, it is going to take a whole line of industry folks to make sure that this happens.
David Rind
00:15:30
And it's worth noting that the administration and basically everybody in the industry continues to say that flying is extremely safe right now, especially when compared to other modes of transportation. Well, Alexandra, thanks so much. Appreciate it.
Alexandra Skores
00:15:43
Thank you.
David Rind
00:15:47
On Friday morning, we learned that controllers handling flights around Newark experienced yet another outage. The FAA said just before 4am Eastern, radar was blacked out for about 90 seconds and that communications were also impacted.
Air Traffic Control Audio
00:16:04
...1989, I hand you off here, our scopes just went black again. If you care about this, contact your airline and try to get some pressure for them to fix this stuff. New York departure now, 120.8...
FedEx 1989 Pilot
00:16:15
120.8, sorry to hear about that, FedEx19, I am switching, good luck guys.
David Rind
00:16:27
One Thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Paola Ortiz and me, David Rind. Our senior producers are Matt Martinez, Felicia Patinkin, and Faiz Jamil. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan Dzula is our technical director, and Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Mark Duffy, Alex Manassari, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nicole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Emily Williams, Aaron Cooper, and Wendy Brundage. We'll be back on Wednesday. I'll talk to you then.
