Kate Kelly
speaker
115 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 6 Jul
Kate Kelly’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 2.
Appearances
But there was a little part of me that thought, you don't quite have this.
So I went back out and did some more reporting, digging into that little piece that was bugging me.
And it turned out the conspiracists were essentially right.
Because I had that extra time and I was willing to be surprised, I think I got the right story and was able to deliver that to our readers.
So I'm really grateful that that open-mindedness is there in me, but is also shot through our institution where the editor will say, yeah, take another two weeks and get it right.
If this kind of independent journalism is important to you, you can support it and the coverage that I do by subscribing to The New York Times.
It's a really great question, Rachel, and one that I've been asking myself and my colleagues. Are we just paying more attention in the wake of the DCA crash to issues, whether it's wing bumping or actual crashes in the national airspace, or are there actually more occurring? Anecdotally, it certainly feels like the latter. But what I think has really caught people's attention
are these issues at Newark Liberty International Airport, which is one of the busiest in the national air system in the U.S.,
They had a major radar and radio outage on Monday, the 28th of April, that led to essentially chaos for passengers and a public outcry among government officials and even among some controllers themselves that the system was not safe and was not necessarily reliable for all the people flying in and out of that airport.
Picture a relatively normal early afternoon at an air traffic control hub. where you have these air traffic controllers who essentially guide planes in and out of airports, sitting at workstations in front of what we call scopes, radar scopes. And this is kind of a circular screen that tells you within a certain diameter of airspace which aircraft are flying in and out.
So they're watching these, they have a headset, and the headset is attached to a radio frequency through which they can have two-way communications with pilots who are in the air. So they're sitting there, and out of nowhere, some of the radar scopes essentially go dark. Not all of them, but some of them.
And all of the radios go silent.
So what happens then is one person starts shouting, I've lost my radar feed. A supervisor rushes over to see what's going on. Another controller grabs a landline telephone, calls colleagues in air traffic control who are based in Long Island, and says, please hold your planes in the LaGuardia Airport airspace because I don't know if my planes are going to drift into your planes.
I have no way to communicate with my planes.
And then at the same time, controllers gathered around one of the radar screens that was functioning. And as it was described to me, they were just trying to figure out what else they could possibly do to improve the situation, ensure that crashes didn't happen, or get in touch with other colleagues who could help them.
But there wasn't a whole lot left for them to do other than hope for the best and hope that their visuals and their audios came back.
After a while, the radio frequencies did return.
And a short while after that, they also got the radar back.
Other controllers who are in the building come and take over because the experience of those that have been on those positions is just so terrifying that they can't be expected to just pick right up on the work. And, you know, there was one person in the hallway apparently who was just trembling and others who went home and cried and are having nightmares at this point.
Yes, controllers have told me, Rachel, that this is the worst type of thing that can happen other than an actual crash. How long did that outage last in total? To the best of our understanding, the radio came back after roughly 30 seconds. Although, to those who were in the room witnessing this, apparently it felt like... An eternity. An eternity. Yep.
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