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
The displays took a little bit longer, so that was closer to a minute and a half.
90 seconds is a long time when you consider the fact that these aircraft are supposed to be separated, varying depending on their location and how close to landing or takeoff they are, by at least a couple of miles, two, three miles, and at least 1,000 vertical feet.
So within 90 seconds, you could well see how just mathematically you could have planes crashing into each other without proactive guidance from an air traffic controller.
So to the best of our understanding, flights were circling, they were delayed in landing, they were delayed in taking off. Clearly, what had happened created a disruption and flights had been unable to proceed, essentially. So they tried to get those flights back on track. But in the days that have followed, there have been flight cancellations. There have been delays.
Passengers that colleagues of ours have talked to at the airport have been frustrated. They said they're waiting on customer service calls for 45 minutes or an hour. They don't know what to do. People broadly are nervous about flying in and out of Newark Airport. They're wondering if it's safe.
This has had a cascading effect of creating anxiety and mistrust in the public, and it's unlikely that there's a quick fix.
Yeah, so I think the show has covered really well some of the issues bedeviling the United States airspace and air traffic control in particular. But in my opinion, Newark has become sort of this recent crucible for a combination of two pretty major strands fraying at the same time, both technology that we all collectively rely on to keep air travel safe and
and staffing issues so all of that is combining for probably the most public most nerve-wracking air travel disruption that we've seen in recent years it's all coming to a head at newark basically yes well let's start with the technology piece of it can you just explain what exactly is going wrong with the technology at newark
Yeah, so start with the notion that system-wide, the FAA is working with pretty dated technology. Two lawmakers this week have referred to the fact that this Newark outage generated with a quote-unquote fried copper wire.
I haven't been able to verify that with government officials, but it's been spoken of and written about and is probably a plausible metaphor, if not a real explanation, because you are dealing with copper wiring in a lot of these locations. Got it.
That's right. The other problem with this aged system is that it's prone to hiccups and delays that can make it extremely difficult at times for air traffic controllers to keep up with what is happening. The air traffic information they're getting may not be real time or may be frozen or interrupted permanently. by glitches along the line. Just explain that.
So the way that air traffic control works at a lot of airports might actually be different than what you think it is. You might have an image of a bunch of people sitting in a tower at a place like Newark Airport with radar or maybe even with binoculars looking out the window and directing those flights in and out, watching them land and take off from the runway.
That's actually not the full picture. You do have people sitting in a tower at the airport, but you also have a whole bunch of people sitting off-site in locations that might be dozens of miles away, watching that air traffic as well, and using radar scopes and two-way radio communications to guide those airplanes.
When it comes to Newark, for a long time, decades, many of their air traffic controllers were working at a hub in Long Island, in a town called Westbury, New York. But last summer, the FAA decided to relocate a bunch of those people from Long Island to Philadelphia.
And in order to safely relocate those people to Philadelphia and make sure that they had the technology to do their jobs there, the FAA did sort of a workaround for the data feeds that go from Newark Airport to Philadelphia.
So when you have planes in the air at Newark and you have flight plans and vectors, meaning the angles at which airplanes come into the airport, that all represents a whole lot of data. So the data that's generated from Newark Airport typically would be sent via copper wiring or broadband to the air traffic control hub. Right.
So rather than route that data straight from Newark to Philadelphia, the FAA, for whatever reason, decided we'll keep our feed from Newark to Long Island, and then we'll send it from Long Island to Philadelphia. In and of itself, with fast transmission in this day and age, that shouldn't be a problem. But technology experts tell me it has created latency issues like very slight delays.
And it's also made that Philadelphia data feed vulnerable to other hiccups in the system.
Yeah, that's right. And we saw a manifestation of that potential for failure last September 2nd. And what happened was that several of the radarscopes in the Philadelphia location where the newer controllers were working, froze up.
So there have been three outages that we know of, including the one that occurred last week. Wow. The first one I'll come back to in a second, because it's sort of a horse of a different color. But the one I was mentioning... And it resulted from the sort of pit stop idea that we were talking about. It essentially related to the fact that this data was traveling a little bit further.
Showing 61–80 of 115 · page 4 of 6
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