Fiber cut and circuit failure halt flights at major East Coast airports

Ground stops across the Northeast

The US Federal Aviation Administration halted traffic at some of the busiest airports on the East Coast on Monday, September 21, after a telecommunications failure disrupted air traffic control communications. Ground stops were issued at New York’s John F. Kennedy International and LaGuardia airports, Newark Liberty, Philadelphia International and Teterboro, while Boston Logan was also affected. Reuters reported that the disruption snarled more than 1,000 flights.

A circuit failed while its backup was already cut

According to the FAA, the trouble began when an older primary communications circuit serving the Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach Control facility, which guides aircraft across a heavily travelled part of Northeast airspace, failed. The system tried to switch to its backup path, but the reserve fiber-optic cable had already been severed. Verizon said construction contractors working near an Amtrak rail line in New Jersey dug up and cut its cable, adding that its facilities had been fully functional up to that point and that it bore no responsibility for the incident.

Ground stops were imposed in waves as officials worked out how to reroute traffic: Newark, Teterboro and Philadelphia were among the first, and JFK and LaGuardia followed in the early afternoon. The stop at Boston Logan, which had paused arrivals because of spillover volume, was lifted later in the day.

Recovery and residual delays

By about 6 p.m. Eastern time the telecommunications lines had been repaired. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said all airport operations in the Northeast were resuming, but warned that clearing the accumulated delays would take time and advised passengers to check with their airlines. The flight-tracking service FlightAware counted more than 600 delayed flights at Newark and Philadelphia alone, and hour-long delays were still reported at several airports at the time of the update.

Why it matters

The episode showed how heavily the system leans on a small number of communications links. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford told reporters that the failure exposed a problem with the network design: with the primary circuit out and the backup cut, the agency had to suspend service at the affected sites in order to change the circuit, because keeping one path running meant losing the other. “The network design is terrible. And if we don’t fix the network design, we’re going to continue having these failures,” he said.