FAA Ground-Stops Newark, JFK, LaGuardia and Philadelphia After Backup Circuit Fails at Same TRACON That Broke Down Last Year

Circuit Fails, Backup Line Is Cut Too

The Federal Aviation Administration ordered ground stops Monday at Newark Liberty International, Teterboro, and Philadelphia International airports starting around 10 a.m., then expanded the stops to JFK, LaGuardia and Westchester County by early afternoon, according to CBS News and Times Now.

The agency's first public explanation was vague: "issues with some frequencies at Philadelphia TRACON," the Terminal Radar Approach Control facility that guides planes in and out of Newark and Philadelphia airspace.

By afternoon, FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford gave a fuller account to CBS News. A primary circuit at Philadelphia TRACON blew Monday morning. When the system tried to switch to its backup line, controllers discovered that line had also been cut at a construction site somewhere between New Brunswick and Newark, New Jersey.

"That fiber break is probably 13 hours to repair. It's massive, I'm told," Bedford said, according to CBS News. ABC News reported Bedford said the Northeast airspace would need to close for at least 30 minutes so crews could swap the circuit in Philadelphia, and that a first attempted fix did not work.

The Numbers

ABC News reported more than 400 flights canceled nationwide and over 4,000 delays as of roughly 2:30 p.m. Eastern, with Newark hit hardest at over 280 cancellations.

Earlier in the day, Flightradar24 data cited by Times Now and ZeroHedge showed Newark with 92 cancellations and nearly 70 diversions by around 1 p.m., with average delays near 170 minutes. CNBC put the diversion count at 67 planes as of 1 p.m., including international flights from Iceland, Egypt, Greece, Spain and France. A United flight from Berlin was diverted to Detroit; an SAS flight from Stockholm was sent to Washington Dulles.

CBS New York reported the JFK ground stop ran from 12:38 p.m. until 3 p.m., and LaGuardia's from 12:43 p.m. until 9:59 p.m., pulling in flights from more than a dozen regions including Chicago, Atlanta, Boston, Miami, Toronto and Montreal. ABC News reported airspace later reopened at JFK and LaGuardia, but the Philadelphia and Newark stops remained in effect with no estimated resumption time.

United Airlines, which runs one of its largest hubs out of Newark, said the outage was "affecting all airlines in the Northeast" and issued a travel waiver, according to ABC News. American Airlines also issued waivers for Philadelphia, according to Travel Market Report.

Not the First Time

Philadelphia TRACON took over approach control duties for Newark in 2024 and has had repeated radar and radio failures since, serious enough that some controllers went on trauma leave, according to ZeroHedge.

On August 28 of last year, the FAA ground-stopped Newark for roughly two hours over what it called equipment issues affecting "some radio frequencies in the Philadelphia TRACON area," the same facility and the same stated cause as Monday's outage, ZeroHedge reported.

NBC News noted an even more serious incident last year at this corridor: an equipment malfunction left about a dozen planes flying without radio contact for 90 seconds over crowded New Jersey airspace. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said at the time there was never any danger of a midair collision.

The Fix Underway, and What's Still Unclear

The Trump administration announced a multibillion-dollar overhaul of U.S. air traffic control equipment last year, according to CNBC, and on Monday the Transportation Department and FAA rolled out a new AI-powered tool designed to help minimize flight delays, starting in Washington, D.C. Whether that tool would have caught a severed fiber line at a construction site is a separate question the FAA has not addressed.

The FAA has not said who was doing construction work near the cut backup line, whether that contractor knew a critical FAA circuit ran through the site, or whether any permitting or notification failure contributed to the break. No investigation into the cut line has been announced.

Bedford's 13-hour repair estimate, given Monday afternoon, would put the fiber fix sometime in the middle of the night. Whether Philadelphia TRACON's frequencies and the flight schedules of three of the country's busiest airports are actually back to normal by Tuesday morning remains an open question the FAA had not resolved as of Monday's ground stops.