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
And the data stream that feeds into these Newark air traffic controller screens was affected by data issues at a different local airport that were sort of overstressing the system. And what was the third outage that you mentioned that you said was kind of different? So that one was a more significant disruption. It occurred last August 27th.
And what happened there was that an outside vendor working for the FAA accidentally clipped or unplugged literally a feed of data. Oh, my God. Yeah. So you could hear the air traffic controller who was dealing with the downed technology saying, attention all aircraft, radar contact is lost. Radar contact is lost when you listen to the audio recordings from that day.
That was another 90-second outage.
Yeah, I remember somebody who was around at the time told me they don't even necessarily care what the exact causes are of this outage, whether it's someone with a big pair of scissors or someone, you know, knocking a plug out of the wall. Regardless, this should be the Fort Knox of aviation data.
In other words, this should be an impenetrable system with multiple backups that is never permitted to fail.
Yeah, Rachel, the technology really is problematic. But where you have a toxic combination here is when you throw in the fact that Newark has already been struggling for a while now with chronic staffing shortages. And all of that is impeding these controllers' ability to function.
Yeah, so as your listeners know, because you guys have talked about this, there have been air traffic controller shortages nationwide. So why has Newark been a particular crux of the problem? It has to do with the complexity of it and the amount of experience that's needed and expected. So if you want to become an air traffic controller...
You would start with a training process in Oklahoma City, which is where the FAA's academy is. You would have had to apply for that and be admitted to the program. Then after that, you would probably go to a pretty light airspace, at least relative to these New York City airspaces, Fargo, North Dakota, for example. Hmm.
And maybe you would do that for a couple of years, and maybe after that, you would do something like Indianapolis, Indiana. And then after you had done that for a while, you might eventually work your way up to an airspace like Newark.
But even when you arrived at Newark, even if you were coming from a major airport like O'Hare, you would still need to train for roughly a year to learn all the nuances and all the techniques associated with that Newark airspace. Right.
So even if today the FAA identified 10 new people that it wanted to send to do air traffic control at Newark, that would be a year, give or take, before they'd be ready.
And these staffing issues at Newark are not new. In fact, part of the reason that these people we're talking about were relocated to Philadelphia in the first place was to solve for a problem that Newark controllers were having with low personnel. They had been working in Long Island for many years, controlling this Newark airspace from Long Island.
And there were ongoing issues recruiting and retaining people who could work that airspace. Some of it had to do with cost of living. Long Island, New York area, an expensive place to live, an expensive place to try to buy a house or raise a family. So it spent several years trying to convince controllers and their union that they should move to Philadelphia.
The FAA reasoned that with the lower cost of living in the Philadelphia area, they might be able to recruit and retain more people. So that move to Philadelphia, did that help with the staffing issues, ultimately? Well, no. And to be fair to the FAA, it was always going to be a long-term play, given this kind of long pipeline we were just talking about.
But a variety of issues have meant that their numbers are actually down at this point. So let me just walk you through it. For a long time, the FAA had set the air traffic controller target associated with this Newark space at over 60 people. 63 is the number that I heard.
But around the time that they proposed and undertook this move of people to Philadelphia, they changed the target to something like 42 air traffic controllers. That would be a full staff for controlling Newark airspace from this particular hub.
I don't have a clear explanation for that, and controllers think it's strange. But they lowered their expectations at some stage in time, maybe because they were just trying to be pragmatic about the numbers that they had. Now, almost a year into this relocation, the FAA now says they have 22 people who are fully certified to work the airspace. But let me put that in context for you.
So according to a government document about staffing that I've reviewed, A full day shift, an eight-hour shift, should be 10 people. And a night shift should be 14 people. At the time of this radar outage that we're talking about, you had four controllers on duty sitting in front of those radar scopes.
Well, let me tell you what the CEO of United Airlines says about this. He's working in close contact with the FAA. He wrote in a letter today, In ideal weather with full staffing and with perfectly functioning technology, the FAA tells us that the airport can only handle 77 flights per hour.
And yet, the FAA regularly approves schedules of 80-plus flights per hour almost every day between 3 and 8 p.m.
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