What's wrong with America's air traffic control systems?

The radios and radar keep going out at Newark International, and it's part of a broader crisis in air traffic control. It happened again Sunday, when flights in and out of the New Jersey airport were halted for 45 minutes after radar screens briefly went dark. The Trump administration is working desperately to fix the larger problem.

"Worried pilots and air traffic controllers" are pleading with the Federal Aviation Administration to address the "aging infrastructure" that tracks and directs flights around the country, said NBC News. The good news is that pilots are trained to handle communications and radar failures. Such outages are "not a good situation," Benjie Coleman, a former air safety inspector, "but it's not a lethal situation." Still, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Sunday on "Meet the Press" that the technology undergirding the system is "old." So the problems keep coming. "The lights are blinking, the sirens are turning and they're saying, 'Listen, we have to fix this.'"

What did the commentators say?

Newark's problems are part of a "much larger crisis," said Thomas Black at Bloomberg. Controllers are working with "equipment that is decades old" — sometimes even using 1980s-era floppy disks — "adding to their stress levels." There are 138 air traffic systems in the United States: The General Accounting Office (GAO) has deemed three-fourths of them "unsustainable or potentially unsustainable." But the FAA has been slow to roll out updates and improvements. The slow pace has "reached a point where it is now impeding air safety."

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"People will die" if the problems continue to be ignored, said Kelsey McKinney at Defector. The GAO report happened because a "severe system outage" in January 2023 "disrupted thousands of flights." That disruption came after two other GAO reports, in 2016 and 2019, "warning of the aging FAA systems." It is time to start taking seriously the problems of America's decaying infrastructure. "Maintenance is expensive, but it's much less expensive than decay."

"Get ready for another summer of air-traffic delays or worse," said The Wall Street Journal. The problems go beyond technology: The FAA's "dysfunctional training and hiring system" also plays a role, leading to a shortage of controllers. Half the agency's air traffic control trainees never complete the program. Duffy is working to make reforms, but the better alternative would be to follow "Canada and other nations" and turn America's air traffic control "over to a private nonprofit."

What next?

Duffy announced a "massive effort to modernize" the system within four years, said NextGov. A House committee has given preliminary approval to a $12.5 billion plan to upgrade the technology, but Duffy said the cost of moving quickly is "gonna be more than that." He did not give a specific price tag.

In the meantime, there will be fewer flights in and out of Newark, said Business Insider. "I hate delays, I hate cancellations," Duffy said on "Meet the Press." But slowing traffic at the problematic airport is necessary to "make sure we can do it safely."