Imagine for a tense 90 seconds that the very people responsible for safely guiding airplanes into one of the busiest airports in the U.S. couldn’t see a thing.
That’s exactly what happened at Newark Liberty International Airport on May 9, when a tiny piece of burnt wiring wiped out radar and radio systems, leaving planes flying blind.
FAA’s Warning Signs Ignored for Years
You might think such a critical failure would come as a total surprise, but an internal FAA report leaked to DailyMail.com reveals this was far from the case.
The agency’s own officials had plenty of warning that their decades-old communications setup was fragile and failing.
Back in 2022 and 2023, a dozen or more airport towers across Southern California suffered similar outages under eerily familiar conditions.
The root cause? Overloaded ethernet cables struggling to handle a flood of data between radars and control towers.
The FAA knew this was a national problem because they use the same outdated system at airports all over the country.
Patchwork Fixes That Just Don’t Cut It
Rather than replacing the old technology, FAA leaders decided to slap on software patches and have staff manually monitor signals to catch failures.
Tim Arel, who until recently led the FAA’s Air Traffic Organization, signed off on this “fix.” But retired FAA engineer Rick Castaldo wasn’t having it.
“Monitoring a failure doesn’t stop it from happening,” he told us bluntly.
“They knew these outages would keep coming but did nothing.”
A Troubling Pattern of Crashes and Close Calls
This technical mess isn’t just theoretical — it’s been tied to a wave of scary incidents in U.S. skies recently. From a deadly midair collision in Washington DC in January to multiple telecom blackouts at Newark and even Denver, the safety system feels frayed at the edges.
One overlooked disaster struck on June 16, 2022, when 11 control towers including LAX and San Diego suddenly lost all monitor displays.
Another outage on Christmas Day shut down 14 more monitors at smaller airports.
In some cases, workers had to manually unplug and reset network lines, like unplugging a home router — and some outages dragged on for days.
How The STARS System Is Causing Chaos
The FAA’s processing platform, called STARS, is at the heart of the problem.
Designed by Raytheon in the 1990s to work with old analog wiring, it’s now forced to send data over modern ethernet cables.
The newer cables send data in tiny digital “packets,” but when too many flood the line, it causes a traffic jam that crashes the whole system.
This “cascade event” means towers lose radar and weather info, leaving controllers flying blind — just like at Newark.
Why Newark’s System Is Particularly Vulnerable
Southern California suffers because of the huge distances between radars and towers, but Newark is no exception.
When the FAA moved Newark’s air traffic control to Philadelphia last July to ease staffing shortages, the airport’s data still had to travel nearly 100 miles over old copper wires.
Critics call it a dangerous “extension cord” made of outdated technology.
Worse still, a pre-move FAA analysis dismissed the risk of a communication failure as nearly impossible — just one in 11 million.
Experts Demand Real Redundancy and Upgrades
Castaldo argues that backup systems are essential, especially for air traffic control, where safety margins have to be rock solid.
“Every airplane has built-in backups for emergencies — so why doesn’t the FAA?” he asks.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blasted the Biden administration for moving forward without properly updating Newark’s telecom lines, blaming previous officials for ignoring the problem.
Duffy promises new fiber-optic lines and a three-year overhaul to modernize radar and wiring nationwide.
Can the FAA Fix This Before Another Disaster Strikes?
Despite these promises, insiders worry Duffy’s efforts may be blocked by a slow-moving bureaucracy. Upgrading such a complex system while keeping flights running smoothly is a huge challenge — likened to changing a flat tire on a speeding car.
FAA veteran Tim Arel is stepping down soon, but many key officials involved in the problems remain. Castaldo warns, “They need fresh leadership to fix this mess.”
With outages continuing into early May, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
As he puts it, “I wouldn’t feel safe flying into Newark right now — especially in bad weather or peak hours when dozens of planes are in the sky.”