Annie Minoff
speaker
239 appearances
11 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Annie Minoff’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And the CEO of United Airlines, which has a major hub at Newark, has personally tried to reassure the public. In an email to customers, he said that it is, quote, absolutely safe to fly out of the airport. But there's another voice that you don't often hear from after incidents like this. The people on the front lines of air safety. And this week, the Journal sat down with one of them.
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Annie Minoff. It's Thursday, May 15th. Coming up on the show, the chaos at Newark through the eyes of an air traffic controller.
That's aviation reporter Andrew Tangle. He sat down with air traffic controller Jonathan Stewart earlier this week to talk about what's been going on at Newark. The circumstances of their conversation were a bit unusual. As the interview kicked off, Jonathan smoked a cigar while gunfire went off in the background.
Jonathan has been in air traffic control for 25 years. He started his career in the Air Force in the late 90s.
Jonathan describes airspace like the layers of a cake, with each layer managed by a dedicated team of controllers. The people in the towers at the airport, they're in charge of the bottom layer, where the planes take off and touch down. But Jonathan, he's in the layer above that. He's what's known as a radar controller.
This video game is especially intense at Newark, which is some of the busiest airspace in the world.
But lately, Jonathan says that he and other controllers have been pushed beyond their limits. Throughout the country, air traffic control facilities are understaffed. The FAA has almost 11,000 fully certified controllers, but that's about 3,000 short of its target.
Staffing shortages at Newark aren't just a problem for controllers like Jonathan. Our colleague Andrew says they're also a problem for travelers.
And so to try to fix the staffing problem, the FAA made a big move. Last year, it moved oversight of Newark's airspace from Long Island, where it had been for years, to Philadelphia.
But this move to Philly also created some unforeseen consequences.
Instead of having its own radar, the new facility would rely on a link from Long Island. But that link wasn't always reliable. That became frighteningly clear in late April, when those Newark controllers lost their radar and radios for about 90 seconds.
For the controllers involved, the ongoing glitches around Newark Airport have been harrowing.
Air traffic controllers can take trauma leave after an incident to look after their mental health. Earlier this month, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said that workers taking trauma leave had made the staffing situation at Newark worse. He described controllers as having, quote, walked off the job.
That comment rubbed Jonathan the wrong way.
We asked United about CEO Scott Kirby's comment. A United spokesman pointed to Kirby's more recent statements calling for better equipment and working conditions for air traffic controllers.
Jonathan was speaking from experience. When Andrew interviewed him, Jonathan was also on trauma leave after a scary incident of his own. That's after the break.
It wasn't just the long hours that were wearing Jonathan down, though. Since the technical glitches, he'd been doing a more complicated version of his job. Beyond the usual radar procedure, Jonathan was using pen and paper techniques to track aircraft, just in case an outage happened again.
A nose-to-nose situation, meaning two planes were at risk of a mid-air collision. Leading up to this moment, Jonathan had been monitoring two planes departing out of two New Jersey airports, a business jet and another small plane. The two aircraft were taking off around the same time. Jonathan was in charge of making sure that they stayed out of each other's way.
But before he knew it, the aircraft were at the same altitude and at risk of colliding.
After the incident, Jonathan filed an internal report saying that the situation at the Philadelphia control facility was unsafe. An FAA spokesperson told the journal that Jonathan's report is under review and that the agency takes safety reports seriously. Jonathan says these kinds of experiences can be traumatic.
Showing 81–100 of 239 · page 5 of 12
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