Newark PHL Radar Failure

[inthrewtheoutdor]

From Reddit posts:

The radar and frequencies of the Newark area in Philadelphia went out for 5 minutes today. The FAA was aware of the risk and chose to ignore any contingency plan to mitigate the risk to the flying public. Imagine you’re on the highway going 200 mph and suddenly you go blind and you have no way to stop. This is what happens to thousands of passengers flying into EWR today.


To be clear the radar feed at legacy N90 was still working properly which further proves the absolute disregard for safety the agency has taken on this ill conceived project.

_______

Serious EWR Radar Outage

The new Area C (EWR) at PHL lost their ENTIRE radar feed and frequencies today for about 5 minutes this afternoon. Blank screens.

Anyone hear of this/affected? Any near mid airs that will make the news? NATCA National press release?

It’s only the beginning.

__________

Extreme recklessness prevails at the FAA. After ignoring warnings for this exact failure, a month in to the move and days shy of promised full operation rates at EWR, terror struck. For 5 minutes all radar feeds vanished. Absolute chaos and recklessness took over the room. Thousands of lives put at serious risk over populated cities.

Back at the NY TRACON the feeds were fine. Managers turned the old EWR scopes on. Feeds worked there where it’s set up safely and properly. Talk of trying to force the old EWR controllers back to the scopes to help were stopped.

This is one of the biggest aviation incidents involving loss of RADAR in decades. It’s a miracle no one was killed.

First your force families to a new city in month’s notice to work in a shanty built TRACON room and now they have to deal with full blown WW2 era RADAR failures?

WHAT WILL IT TAKE FAA?! Another midair over the EWR/LGA border like what happened in 1960 after numerous ignored near collisions?

Do we really need another deadly accident to remember why the NY TRACON was created in the first place?

WAKE UP!

Follow for updates

https://twitter.com/x/status/1828529843970912634

 

[Geeare27]

The mere possibility of this happening should have made this move a complete nonstarter. It's unthinkable that the FAA knew this could happen and didn't care

 

[FightingIrish2012]

I heard that it was no big deal.

 

[theflyingpig]

honestly more people would care if it was some place other then n90. not my sentiment just what I heard from folks

 

[boots]

Thanks Rich Santa

 

[32andBelow]

Thanks Rich Santa

Yah he’s in charge of everything

 

[GulfCharlie]

Yah he’s in charge of everything

Eh... I know what boots is getting at and to be honest it has merit. Rich could have fought this or supported the controllers to the end. Issue is that the majority of the NAS dislikes N90 (as someone stated earlier) and are extremely indifferent what happens to it.

 

[PooseMaGoose]

Awful decisions/indecision spawn from the top. The ATO has some seriously weak leadership right now and has been dealing with a “revolving door” phenomenon where leaders move on to the next great thing before any meaningful direction can take place. The backfill then implements his or her great vision which halts any momentum that was taking place previous to them.

The result is shit like this.

 

[Raise when?]

Sad as it is nobody cares because “nothing bad happened”

People only care if there’s a disaster

 

[32andBelow]

Eh... I know what boots is getting at and to be honest it has merit. Rich could have fought this or supported the controllers to the end. Issue is that the majority of the NAS dislikes N90 (as someone stated earlier) and are extremely indifferent what happens to it.

Point is what’s the whole union doing. Were there resolutions from the rest of the NEB to fight this?

 

[GulfCharlie]

Point is what’s the whole union doing. Were there resolutions from the rest of the NEB to fight this?

Nothing. The whole Union is doing nothing. It seems (operative word) that Rich is trying to give the controllers that are forced to move everything he can (although I truly and honestly felt he could have stopped this thing right out of the gate). I do not agree with the move, period. It was an outright betrayal of leadership to appease higher ups in the agency (my opinion) and even then we still do not know what NATCA go out of the transfer (see FOIA's where it is redacted).

 

[Dontbotherme]

Awful decisions/indecision spawn from the top. The ATO has some seriously weak leadership right now and has been dealing with a “revolving door” phenomenon where leaders move on to the next great thing before any meaningful direction can take place. The backfill then implements his or her great vision which halts any momentum that was taking place previous to them.

The result is shit like this.

When they promote poor to mediocre controllers to management positions, that don’t all of a sudden get high performers. Management incompetence is the biggest issue with the FAA.

 

[32andBelow]

When they promote poor to mediocre controllers to management positions, that don’t all of a sudden get high performers. Management incompetence is the biggest issue with the FAA.

The biggest issue is no one stays in any management job long enough to see anything through. And half the managers are temp or acting.

 

[Dontbotherme]

The biggest issue is no one stays in any management job long enough to see anything through. And half the managers are temp or acting.

I think the biggest issue is the people they are selecting for management positions. It’s the FAN approach. Favoritism, availability, nepotism. If you put high performing controllers into operational supervisory positions, you’ll get much better results across the board. The problem is that poor to mediocre controllers are the ones who keep moving off the boards and their lack of operational understanding leads to dumb ideas in management. You need quality people to move from controllers to management positions to make the Agency flourish. Otherwise, you have what’s occurring now.

 

[32andBelow]

I think the biggest issue is the people they are selecting for management positions. It’s the FAN approach. Favoritism, availability, nepotism. If you put high performing controllers into operational supervisory positions, you’ll get much better results across the board. The problem is that poor to mediocre controllers are the ones who keep moving off the boards and their lack of operational understanding leads to dumb ideas in management. You need quality people to move from controllers to management positions to make the Agency flourish. Otherwise, you have what’s occurring now.

No one wants to make anything better cus they just worried about the next thing they will apply for.

 

[inthrewtheoutdor]

More info from reddit

This was not a single senor radar failure. This the entire area screens going completely blank with nothing but a video map.

Newark's feed is a telephone line from Westbury, Westbury gets the direct feed still. During SRM panels the exact situation was brought up because of the added potential failure points by running a jumper feed from Westbury instead of a direct feed.

It was categorized as Moderate risk. The FAA had to mitigate this down to low. They did this by having some backup system that if the feed gets lost or looped that all targets and information would freeze where it last was tracked an all scoped.

THIS FAILED. The screens on every single scope disappeared. This is a massive issue. The mitigating backups failed which means people flying in and around Newark are at Moderate risk for danger at this very moment. This is unacceptable.

 

[CoffeeIV]

I think the biggest issue is the people they are selecting for management positions. It’s the FAN approach. Favoritism, availability, nepotism. If you put high performing controllers into operational supervisory positions, you’ll get much better results across the board. The problem is that poor to mediocre controllers are the ones who keep moving off the boards and their lack of operational understanding leads to dumb ideas in management. You need quality people to move from controllers to management positions to make the Agency flourish. Otherwise, you have what’s occurring now.

Most good controllers rarely go management because it's a terrible job with minimal upside. There are good supervisors out there but it's few and far between and they are usually trying to move up/out. You're left with mostly traffic dodgers on the desk that are incompetent.

 

[Spoony90]

When they promote poor to mediocre controllers to management positions, that don’t all of a sudden get high performers. Management incompetence is the biggest issue with the FAA.

This right here. I’m currently under investigation because I hung up on a supe while on position while a deal was happening in his sector. And yet, I’m in trouble

 

[Move78]

No one wants to make anything better cus they just worried about the next thing they will apply for.

This

 

[32andBelow]

This