An air traffic control radio outage has grounded all inbound flights to Newark Liberty Airport in New Jersey.
Incoming flights from across the US and Canada will be slowed down, with average delays of as long as 2.5 hours and some nearly four hours.
Departing flights did not appear to be impacted.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said the outage is due to an equipment issue, causing air traffic controller to lose their radio frequencies.
The alert affects flights arriving between August 28 at 12:22pm ET and August 29 at 11:59pm.
Travelers have shared their frustrations on social media, some saying their flight has been delayed three times within 15 minutes.
The flight chaos comes as the busy Labor Day travel weekend is getting underway, and the Newark airport is expecting more than three million passengers over the holiday.
‘Traveling this weekend? It’s going to be busy,’ wrote the Newark Airport in a post on X, recommending that travelers budget extra time to arrive, park, check in and get through security. The airport has not acknowledged the current outage.
Incoming flights from across the US and Canada will be slowed down, with average delays of as long as 2.5 hours, with some nearly four hours. Departing flights did not appear to be impacted
This is the second outage in the past 24 hours affecting controllers at the Philadelphia ATC center, which manages Newark airspace.
The previous occurred on Wednesday between 6:30pm and 7:30pm, when audio briefly failed, making communication between planes and controllers unclear.
Controllers at Newark were warned that frequency issues could occur at any time over the next 24 hours, an on-duty controller told ABC News.
To manage the situation, the FAA started limiting flights into Newark to 28 per hour through at least Friday, down from the usual 34.
Arriving planes are also being spaced about 20 miles apart as they approach the airport.
The FAA last year relocated control of the Newark airspace area to Philadelphia to address staffing and congested New York City area traffic.
The airport has experienced several outages this year, with two in May.
On May 19, a brief two-second outage occurred at the Philadelphia TRACON radar approach control facility around 11:35am.
The flight chaos comes as the busy Labor Day travel weekend is getting underway, and the Newark airport is expecting more than three million passengers over the holiday
The FAA reported no flight disruptions, but the incident was under investigation as part of ongoing equipment reliability concerns.
This was the fourth reported outage in a month, the others hit May 11, May 9 and April 28, which saw over 1,000 flights canceled and significant delays after radar and communications went dark for around 90 seconds.
Following air traffic control issues this spring, the FAA cut the number of flights arriving and departing from the airport throughout the summer.
This article was originally published by a www.dailymail.co.uk . Read the Original article here. .