To ease flight delays and staffing shortages in the New York City area, the FAA shifted oversight of Newark Airport’s airspace to Philadelphia earlier this year. But WSJ’s Andrew Tangel reports that problems remain and new risks have surfaced. Further Listening: -How Spirit Airlines Landed in Bankruptcy -How Southwest Airlines Melted Down Further Reading: -Why Fixing New York Air Traffic Has Been a Bumpy Ride -To Ease Newark Flight Delays, the FAA Turned to Philly. Here’s Why. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What causes flight delays in New York?
If you were stranded at an airport over Thanksgiving weekend or sitting on the tarmac for a long time waiting to take off, there's a pretty good chance you can blame New York.
Chapter 2: How complex is New York's airspace?
New York has been a major bottleneck for years. That's our colleague Andrew Tangle. He covers aviation. It's some of the most complex airspace in the world, definitely in the country.
So if you think about it, you've got Newark, you've got LaGuardia, you've got JFK, and you've got all these other little airports around them, like Teterboro and so forth, and they're all stacked on top of each other. And planes coming from all around the world, helicopters, sightseeing tours in Manhattan, it's all just right there together, and there's not much space.
It's kind of like a metaphor for New York City.
And when the airspace in New York is congested, it has an outsized impact on the rest of the country.
Airlines are finely tuned operations, and once that's thrown off, it just sort of cascades through the nation's air travel system.
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Chapter 3: Why is there a staffing shortage of air traffic controllers?
The Federal Aviation Administration has estimated that as much as 75% of the country's flight delays stem from problems related to New York. 75%. The reason there are so many delays around New York isn't just because it's a complicated airspace. It's also because there aren't enough air traffic controllers there.
It's analogous to any profession where you have the same amount of workload and not enough people. When you've got too much on one controller's plate, the FAA, they basically, they slow air traffic down so that the controllers who are there can handle it safely.
This summer, the FAA rolled out a bold plan in an effort to release this bottleneck. It took oversight of the airspace around Newark Airport, one of the big three airports in the New York area, and moved it to Philadelphia. But things are still a mess. It hasn't fixed the staffing issues yet, and it's introduced some new risks.
And this big high-stakes move by the FAA raises the question of whether or not the cure, at least for now, is worse than the disease.
Chapter 4: What is the FAA's plan to alleviate air traffic issues?
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knutson. It's Monday, December 2nd. Coming up on the show, the struggle to fix America's most complex airspace. When you think about air traffic controllers, you probably picture the people up in airport towers. But that's actually just part of the whole air traffic control ecosystem.
There's actually different kinds of air traffic controllers for different layers of airspace. The people in the towers handle the planes that are the lowest altitude, basically right after takeoff or landing. The air traffic controllers that we're talking about today handle the airspace that's just above that, above takeoff and landing, but still below cruising altitude.
And it's a really stressful job.
The controllers have to make sure that they're lining up all the airplanes safely. They tell them where to go, where to turn, what altitude, what speed to go at, and they've got to juggle all this and sort of act like a conductor at an orchestra.
These controllers don't always work at airports because they don't need to look at planes in the sky. They work mostly off radar screens and other digital equipment. They're part of something called a TRACON, which stands for Terminal Radar Approach Control. There are TRACONs all over the country. For decades, the TRACON controllers in New York worked out of a windowless room on Long Island.
It's this big building tucked in the suburbs of New York City out on Long Island in the town of Westbury. And it's called the New York Terminal Radar Approach Control, or in air traffic control jargon, it's a TRACON.
Working at any TRACON can be stressful, but the TRACON in New York stands apart.
It's kind of the biggest, baddest TRACON in the whole country.
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Chapter 5: How does the culture at TRACON affect operations?
Even the FAA's recruitment videos emphasized how tough the place is. There's an incredible operational challenge here.
The complexity of the traffic, the volume. There's very little room for error.
You've got to be spot on. It's a little bit of an adrenaline rush. It can be different every day. Oh, we're busy? All right, let's go. Let's move. Historically, it is known for having its own culture. People who've worked there historically have described it as a bit of a sort of a rough-and-tumble place where they sort of do things their own way.
Some might say out of necessity because it's so difficult with all the airports stacked on top of each other.
Rough-and-tumble edge. Just say more about what that means. What was the culture like at this Tracon office?
We've heard it described as sort of a place where you get told to suck it up and, you know, deal with. I think it's maybe symbolized in, like, the local New York TRACON graphic on social media with, like, the skeleton, you know, the skull with the headset.
That's, like, the logo or, like, the mascot for the people that work there is, like, a skull and crossbones with a headset on it. Like, we're, like, the pirates of air traffic control.
Yeah, it's a tough place to work and a tough place to thrive. Kind of like New York, right?
The rough-and-tumble culture at the New York TrayCon was even the subject of a 1990s movie featuring John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton called Pushing Tin. Look, it's a bit silly and over-the-top, but it does capture the drama that can be part of the job. There's already a national shortage of air traffic controllers, but the staffing shortage is especially bad at the New York TRACON.
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Chapter 6: What was the response from the Controllers Union?
He goes to the backup. It's also black. Wow. For a controller, it's like having a bag over your head when you're going down the highway.
According to the FAA, the blackout lasted less than a few minutes, during which time the controller had to rely on his memory to guide two planes. And was he able to get the planes down safely?
Yeah, in the end, the radar came back, the planes landed safely, but this is a heart-stopping moment.
How is it possible for something like this to happen?
a contractor essentially pulled the wrong circuit and cut off the feed that was coming from Long Island.
The blackout was just the first of several tech glitches related to this big move. A few weeks later, in October, the system overloaded ahead of Columbus Day. Radars kept flickering, which confused controllers who saw aircraft bouncing around on their screens. There were also failures of the system that's supposed to warn about potentially dangerous winds. And then, last month, another scare.
The controller's radios failed. They couldn't communicate easily with other facilities. Yeah, we have no answer on approach, so I don't know. One FedEx plane coming in for a landing at Newark missed its final approach because the controllers couldn't talk to them and flew potentially into oncoming traffic departing from LaGuardia.
Now, the FAA has been dealing with this since then, but you can see how that episode could be really scary for controllers.
Andrew says that after all these safety issues, morale in Philadelphia got even worse.
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