Safety

US air traffic control in 2025-2026: outages, staffing and the rebuild

May 24, 2026Updated October 1, 202611 min readFor pilots

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In this article

Newark, spring 2025
Flight caps at Newark and the shutdown cuts
Controller staffing: the numbers
The equipment problem
The "brand new" system: plan, money and progress
September 21, 2026: the same weak point
What it means for pilots

On September 21, 2026, a primary telecommunications circuit into Philadelphia TRACON failed. When the FAA went to the backup, it found that a construction crew in New Jersey had cut that line too. Newark went about eight hours without an arriving airliner. It was the same facility, and much the same weak point, that set off the spring 2025 Newark crisis. Here is what has happened since, what the FAA and Congress have committed to, what the auditors have found, and what it means for crews.

Newark, spring 2025

In July 2024 the FAA moved control of Newark airspace from New York TRACON (N90) to Philadelphia TRACON, where it is worked as Area C. The radar and voice data still reached Philadelphia over telecommunications lines from New York.

On April 28, 2025, those links failed. According to CBS News, NATCA said controllers "temporarily lost radar and communications with the aircraft under their control." Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy put the outage at about 30 seconds, and CBS reported that targets took another 30 to 60 seconds to reappear on the scopes. The DOT Inspector General later described it as an approximately 90-second blackout caused by a burnt copper wire. Runway 4L-22R had been closed since April 15 for rehabilitation, so the airport was already short of capacity.

More failures followed. The FAA's Newark statements page records a telecommunications outage at about 3:55 a.m. on May 9 that "lasted approximately 90 seconds" and hit both communications and radar display, another telecommunications issue on May 11, and a loss of radio frequencies for about two seconds on May 19. On May 5 the FAA said "some controllers at the Philadelphia TRACON who work Newark arrivals and departures have taken time off."

At the Secretary's request, the DOT Inspector General opened an audit of the relocation on July 28, 2025, covering the FAA's planning, risk assessment and response. No final report had been posted when we checked.

The fixes came in stages. By July 2025 the FAA had finished new fiber between New York and Philadelphia with two separate paths, kept a temporary satellite backup, and started a STARS hub at Philadelphia to reduce dependence on New York.

Flight caps at Newark and the shutdown cuts

Newark has been under an FAA order limiting hourly operations since May 2025. The rates have moved little.

Date	Action	Hourly limit
May 20, 2025	Interim order	28 arr/28 dep during runway work, 34 after
June 6, 2025	Final order, through Dec 31, 2025	34 arr/34 dep (28/28 on construction weekends)
Sept 25, 2025	Extension to Oct 24, 2026	36 arr/36 dep (72 total)
June 23, 2026	Extension to Oct 30, 2027	36 arr/36 dep, 6 a.m. to 10:59 p.m.

The June 2026 order, published in the Federal Register, gives staffing as the main reason. Area C had 28 certified controllers against a target of 46, about 61%, and the FAA does not expect to reach the target before the end of the summer 2027 scheduling season. On-time arrivals, the order notes, were still only about 75% with the caps in place.

The one nationwide cut came during the 43-day government shutdown. On November 6, 2025, the FAA ordered a 10% reduction at 40 high-volume airports, phased in from 4% on November 7, because controllers working without pay were calling out and the agency saw "signs of stress in the system." CBS News reported that the cuts reached 6% before being rolled back to 3%, and that the order was lifted as of 6 a.m. on November 17, five days after the shutdown ended.

Controller staffing: the numbers

The FAA publishes a controller workforce plan each year. The 2026-2028 plan says the agency "hired 2,028 air traffic controller trainees in FY 2025, the highest number since 2008." It lost 1,460 controllers over the same year, for a net gain of 568. The targets are 2,200 hires in FY 2026, 2,300 in FY 2027 and 2,400 in FY 2028, unchanged from the 2025 plan.

In its May 15, 2026 release, the FAA said it had about 11,000 certified professional controllers (CPCs) as of April 2026, with 4,000 more in training.

The target itself has changed. The 2025 plan listed facility targets totaling 14,633. The 2026 plan sets a FY 2026 total staffing target of 12,563 controllers, after the FAA revised the controller availability factor in its staffing model from 2.14 to 1.87. The agency says the new figure draws on a National Academies review of its staffing models. Staffing gaps quoted before and after the change are measured against different targets, so they are not directly comparable.

The people who work the boards read the same numbers less kindly. NATCA President Nick Daniels told the Senate Commerce Committee on November 19, 2025, that the workforce was about 3,800 fully certified controllers short of the FAA's target, and that in the previous year controllers at 40% of facilities had worked six-day weeks at least once a month. In March 2026 testimony to House appropriators, the DOT Inspector General's office cited a National Academies finding that "19 of the busiest air traffic control facilities serving FAA's Core 30 airports are more than 15 percent below FAA's staffing targets."

Hiring is only the first step. New hires go through the Academy and then on-the-job training at a facility before they certify, which is why the training findings matter as much as the hiring totals. A June 2026 OIG audit of on-the-job training found that supplemental pay had raised instruction costs by 160% while training hours grew less than 20%, and that "FAA has not achieved hourly OJT training target goals."

The equipment problem

The GAO had warned before any of this. Its September 2024 report rated 51 of the FAA's 138 air traffic control systems unsustainable and another 54 potentially unsustainable. The FAA's own BNATCS fact sheet says delay minutes from equipment failures in 2025 were about "300 percent higher than the average from 2010-2024."

The "brand new" system: plan, money and progress

On May 8, 2025, Secretary Duffy announced a plan for what the FAA now calls the Brand New Air Traffic Control System (BNATCS), covering communications, surveillance, automation and facilities. The FAA's target for the core work is the end of 2028.

Congress has paid for part of it. The July 2025 reconciliation law known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act provided $12.5 billion; Holland & Knight's summary lists the largest pieces as $4.75 billion for telecommunications, $3 billion for radars, $1.9 billion for new en route centers and $1 billion for TRACONs. The FY 2026 appropriations law, signed February 4, 2026, provided $13.7 billion for FAA operations, money to hire 2,500 new controllers and $4 billion for facilities and equipment. As AOPA notes, it also bars spending to plan or implement ATC privatization and requires monthly modernization briefings to Congress.

The FAA picked Peraton as prime integrator in December 2025, under a contract the GAO says has a $1.5 billion ceiling. On January 5, 2026, it awarded radar contracts to RTX and Indra to replace up to 612 radars by June 2028.

Progress so far, by the government's own count:

Item	Plan	Reported status
Copper to fiber, satellite or wireless	5,170 connections	2,560 done by May 2026 (GAO); 63% by late August (FAA)
Radio sites converted to digital	1,581 sites	17% by May 2026 (GAO); 388 sites by late August (FAA)
IP voice switches	462	176 installed by late August (FAA)
Radars	612	Contracts awarded January 2026
Surface awareness	200 airports	Installed at 96 towers by late August (FAA)

The August figures come from an FAA release of August 25, 2026.

The GAO's September 2026 report agrees that speeding up modernization is critical, but says "FAA's lack of a reliable lifecycle cost estimate and an integrated master schedule introduce heightened risk to BNATCS." Instead of one master schedule, the FAA was running 11,389 separate project schedules. Different programs had booked separate visits to the same facilities; in one example, technicians are due at a St. Louis site for a voice switch in April 2027 and again eight months later for new displays. DOT partially concurred with both recommendations.

The bill is also growing. DOT had put the total at about $31.5 billion through 2028, the figure the Inspector General's office cited in March 2026. On September 28, 2026, a week after the Philadelphia outage, Senator Eric Schmitt introduced the Modern Skies Act, with Duffy's backing. It would add $30 billion in three $10 billion parts: digital architecture, replacement of towers and other facilities, and a grant program for mid-sized airports. FedScoop counts nearly 60 organizations behind it, including NATCA and Airlines for America. AirlineGeeks puts the new total at $42.5 billion and reports that Duffy acknowledged reluctance in Congress rooted in NextGen's record. Congress had not acted on the bill at the time of writing.

September 21, 2026: the same weak point

The latest outage shows how much of the risk sits in telecommunications. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said, as reported by Reuters and quoted by Travel Noire, that a primary circuit into Philadelphia TRACON failed, and "when it went to flip into the backup, we discovered that the backup fiber had a break." Verizon said construction contractors had dug up its cable beside an Amtrak line in New Jersey. The FAA paused flights into Philadelphia, Teterboro and Newark "due to issues with some frequencies at Philadelphia TRACON," Interesting Engineering reported, and ground stops later reached JFK and LaGuardia. Citing Reuters, Travel Noire put the national toll at about 9,500 flights delayed or canceled by that night. The next day Duffy said the new network is meant to give FAA facilities multiple routes so that one or two failures cannot do this again, and Bedford said the remaining copper should be gone by September 2027.

What it means for pilots

Plan for capacity limits on clear days. Newark is capped through October 2027, and staffing-driven ground delay programs, reduced arrival rates and miles-in-trail restrictions are now part of normal operations in the Northeast. Carry fuel for holding and diversion into the New York and Philadelphia area, where a single facility failure can stop several airports at once.

Know the lost-comm rules, and their limits. Under 14 CFR 91.185, if the failure happens in VFR conditions you continue VFR and land as soon as practicable. In IMC you fly the assigned, vectored, expected or filed route, at the highest of the assigned, minimum IFR or expected altitude. The AIM, section 6-4, calls for squawking 7600 and trying the previous frequency and other means at the same time.

Those rules assume one airplane loses its radio. A ground outage takes out a whole frequency or facility at once, often while aircraft are on vectors. Chip Wright, an airline pilot who was diverted during the April 2025 Newark outage, argued in AOPA Pilot that nothing defines when crews should start lost-comm procedures in a partial facility outage, or how to proceed on a vector without the controller's traffic picture. Your company procedures come first. Before a vectored arrival into busy terminal airspace, it helps to brief what you would fly if the frequency went dead: route, altitude and fix.

Silence may not be your radio. In the Newark events, controllers lost frequencies for seconds to minutes. If a busy frequency goes quiet, try the previous controller, the next sector, tower or 121.5, and use ACARS or dispatch to find out what is happening.

Expect congestion. When a facility is short, fewer controllers work more airspace and frequencies get busier. Keep transmissions short and read back only what is needed.

Report what you see. Use ASAP or NASA ASRS for lost-comm events, frequency outages and staffing-related holding.

Sources

This is general information, not operating guidance. Your company's procedures, your aircraft's manuals and the regulations come first.

US air traffic control in 2025-2026: outages, staffing and the rebuild

Newark, spring 2025

Flight caps at Newark and the shutdown cuts

Controller staffing: the numbers

The equipment problem

The "brand new" system: plan, money and progress

September 21, 2026: the same weak point

What it means for pilots

Sources

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