Newark Liberty International Airport (KEWR) continues to contend with equipment and staffing issues that created major disruptions in April and May. But the airport could ramp up activity earlier than expected.
On Monday, Newark’s 11,000-foot Runway 4L/22R—the busiest of its three runways for departures—reopened for departures about two weeks before a $121 million rehabilitation effort was slated to end. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the airport could boost the rate of arrivals and departures from 28 to 34 per hour once the runway is certified for arrivals, which he predicted will happen June 9 or 10.
Chris Rocheleau, acting administrator of the FAA, said the agency needs only a few more days.
“We’re going to have our technical operations people go out and certify that new runway for arrivals as well,” Rocheleau said at a press conference Monday. “It’s going to take a little bit longer, simply because we want to make sure that the equipment there is certified.”
Duffy said Newark could accommodate the extra traffic despite staffing shortages at the Philadelphia Terminal Radar and Approach Control Facility’s (TRACON) Area C, which last year took over management of the airspace from a New York facility, which also oversees LaGuardia (KLGA) and Kennedy International (KJFK). The plan is to remain at that level until a reevaluation in October.
“What is interesting is I think you were going to beat the timeframe by a couple days,” Duffy told workers from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey on Monday. “But when they saw some of the issues that were happening here at Newark, they actually ramped it up even more.”
Sarah McKeon, who leads the port authority’s aviation department, said of the effort: “It took around-the-clock work. Literally, seven days a week of people, multiple crews, paving, milling, electricians, and port authority aviation, operations, maintenance, and engineering staff to make this happen.”
McKeon said returning operations at Newark to normal levels is the organization’s “top priority.”
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby, who called the carrier’s Newark hub the “crown jewel” of its international gateway network, said it will begin operating on the 34-an-hour rate starting June 15. That’s about four operations per hour shy of the airline’s theoretical capacity at Newark, Kirby said. United is also routing larger aircraft to the airport to accommodate demand.
“If you’re buying a ticket this summer, you can have confidence that that’s the schedule, and I think we’ll be able to gradually ramp that up by the time we get to October and look at the data,” Kirby said.
Kirby said that in the months without runway construction, Newark actually has the airline’s highest on-time rate and lowest cancellation rate of the three main New York-area airports. But in April and May, it experienced hundreds of delays and cancellations, in part due to construction. The runway was last upgraded in 2014.
Triple Threat
The runway closure was just one of three significant challenges that have plagued Newark operations this spring.
Runway 4L/22R was closed on weekends from March 1 to April 14 and permanently starting April 15. An FAA analysis of the expected two-month project predicted construction would “significantly affect carriers’ ability to operate reliably and on time.” Traffic was directed to the airport’s other two runways, one of which is seldom used in normal weather conditions.
“As challenging as the last few weeks have been—and they have been tough—the future looks brighter for Newark than it ever has in my career,” said Kirby. “The things that we have been asking for for years to make this airport operate reliably for customers are now being done.”
The early completion of the project will allow operations to ramp up after the FAA and airlines agreed to restrict them in May. But travelers aren’t out of the woods just yet.
Newark has also battled staffing shortages at the Philadelphia TRACON, which have been compounded by multiple telecommunications outages that caused the temporary loss of all radar and communications. The FAA in May announced it was taking steps to increase staffing and upgrade outdated technology, including copper wiring that is believed to be responsible for the outages.
Duffy on Monday provided the latest on those efforts. The transportation secretary said the facility has only 16 active controllers after six staff took leave following an outage in April. He added, though, that a further 22 controllers are in training, many of which have experience managing other airspace. New personnel will come online “on a rolling basis over the next year,” Duffy said.
“The problem we’re seeing with controllers, it can’t be fixed overnight,” he added. “It takes time to train up on this airspace. But we’ve addressed the problem by bringing more controllers to train up in the Philly TRACON.”
Duffy also pointed to progress on replacing the faulty copper wiring—which beams data to Philadelphia from a facility on Long Island—with fiber-optic cables. Verizon laid the new line last week, and the “hope” is for it to be operational by the end of June or early July.
“They did that in record time, in less than a month’s time,” Duffy said. “That new fiber line is not stood up yet because we’re testing it right now…But that process is underway and, again, happening very quickly.”
The transportation secretary also reiterated his sweeping plan to modernize the nation’s air traffic control systems, which multiple Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports have deemed outdated. Unveiled last month, the plan calls for sweeping technology upgrades at airports and facilities nationwide.
“We may see some of these problems happen in other places around the country,” Duffy said. “And with the same kind of energy and fervor, we’re going to go and address those problems should they come up.”
The secretary has talked up the plan as a transformative effort and on Monday called it the “most important infrastructure project that we’ve had in this country for decades.” A version of the White House’s “Big Beautiful Bill” passed by the House of Representatives allocates $12.5 billion to the project. Duffy said that funding could be approved by the end of July: “By July 1,” by Representative Thomas Kean Jr.’s (R-N.J.) estimate.
“The failure of the past has been the FAA has gotten small tranches of money, not full funding,” Duffy said. “We need full funding. We need the money upfront so we can contract out and build this brand new system across the country.”
Duffy said that if the $12.5 billion package hit the floor today, 90 percent of Democrats and Republicans in both chambers of Congress would support it. If approved, he said, improvements could be seen before the plan’s three-to-four-year time frame.
“[But] you can’t snap your fingers,” Duffy said. “These things take longer than a week or two, or even a month.”
