Pay Attention to What Happened in Newark.
Should you worry about getting on an airline flight tomorrow? No. Should you worry that the Golden Age of phenomenally safe flying may be nearing its end? Yes.
Man vs. airplane, 1959 edition. (Getty images.)
This post is a guide to following aviation-mishap news. Some of the events matter much more than others.
Reports on every kind of “trouble in the skies” tend to mush together, because of their shared inherent drama. A huge rocket ship blows up; a private plane plows into a neighborhood; a passenger-jet engine catches fire.
They all command attention. Some eventually prove to be just bad luck, or fate. One US aircraft carrier, the Harry S. Truman, has lost three of its F/A-18 fighter planes into the Red Sea in recent months. But there does not yet appear to be a systemic cause. (One was reportedly brought down by “friendly fire” from another US ship; one rolled off the carrier deck while being towed; one could not be stopped during a landing attempt. These planes cost $65 million apiece.) Bad discipline or leadership? Maybe. Also maybe just coincidence and terrible luck.
But other aviation disasters are bellwethers, or turning points. In 1956, two airliners collided over the Grand Canyon, killing all 128 people aboard the two planes. From that disaster the modern US aviation-safety system was born. (Congress created the FAA itself in 1958, largely in response to this tragedy.) The Colgan commuter-plane crash near Buffalo in 2009 led to sweeping changes in pilot certification and training. One of many trademark sayings in the flying world is, “Aviation regulations are written in blood.”1
Almost everything bad in aviation involves some degree of bad luck. But the tragedies that change policy and behavior are ones that reveal deeper problems—the “accidents waiting to happen,” that had previously been avoided only because of luck.
At least one of those is staring at us now.
1) The Newark blackout: This was genuinely bad.
Through the decades in which I’ve followed aviation, I’ve kept hearing that the air-traffic control system needed to be “updated” and “modernized.” The 1980s version of that discussion followed Ronald Reagan’s sweeping dismissal of air traffic controllers who had gone on strike.
Ever since then there’s been a three-way tension setting aviation policy, including how and where to invest in FAA systems. Force one: The ever expanding possibilities of technology.2 Force two: The aviation world’s “written in blood” caution about changing anything too quickly. Force three: The budget-cutting passion of most political administrations, thinking they can squeeze fat out of the FAA, NASA, and related groups.
This standoff long predates Donald Trump and the Doge insanity. But the initial Doge cuts, not just at the FAA but also at NASA, NOAA, FEMA, the National Weather Service, safety review boards, and other parts of the air-safety system, have exposed far more of the system to lethal strain.
That strain is what we saw, when the radar screen and the radio transmitters in Newark went dark for 90 seconds last week. It was modern aviation’s version of The Titanic, except that luck kept anyone from being killed.
Rather than spell out the details, I’ll point you to extensive, excellent mainstream coverage already available. Pete Muntean of CNN, himself a pilot and flight instructor, laid out the situation very clearly on Brian Lehrer’s WNYC show today. The WSJ’s coverage by Andrew Tangel is also very good. An authoritative aviation publication I follow, The Air Current, has its (paywalled) stories collected here. One by Will Guisbond last fall warned of Newark radar failures. The popular aviation podcast “Opposing Bases,” run by two veteran pilots and controllers, late last year gave an inside preview of problems likely to arise in Newark.3
As these articles and accounts explain, the bad part of the situation in Newark was that air traffic controllers could not see where the airplanes were, on their radar screens.4 The much worse part was that they could not talk to the pilots, over their radios.
In clear weather, as it luckily was that day, pilots in one airplane can generally “see and avoid” other aircraft. It’s a big sky, even for airliners. But dead radios were a genuine emergency. Clearance to land? Instructions to climb or descend? Headings to avoid other traffic? Instructions on where to divert? All impossible, for seconds that must have seemed like years.5
Again, the Trump people did not invent this problem. But their anti-government ranting and budget cuts made it worse. They own every bit of it now.
2) ‘Go-arounds’ over the Potomac: Not as bad as they sound.
In setting the stage for “trouble in the skies” stories, many reports on Newark have also mentioned an episode last week at National Airport (DCA) in Washington, site of the terrible crash in January. In this recent case, two airline flights in a row were ordered to “go around” when about to land at DCA, because an Army helicopter seemed to be crossing their paths.
Here’s the difference to keep in mind: The breakdown in Newark highlighted a “single point of failure” (the copper wire feeding data to controllers) that could make the whole system collapse. The episode at DCA did reveal problems. But it also illustrated the multi-layered “better safe than sorry” approach on which modern aviation has been built.
Some things in aviation can be alarming to passengers but are not a hazard. A “bumpy ride” over the Rockies, for example: Pilots try to avoid this discomfort for their passengers by asking controllers for a different altitude. But they know the airplane is not at risk.6
The same is true of a “go-around” maneuver, like the ones the two planes at DCA were asked to perform. This occurs when a plane is lined up for landing and less than a minute from touching down. Passengers are strapped in; they’re thinking about baggage or rental cars; they’re supposed to have turned their phones off but mostly have just turned them on, thinking they’re back in range. Then suddenly the flight crew puts on the power and climbs sharply away, to circle for another try.
This can be surprising to most passengers and frightening to some. But for a flight crew it’s a perfectly safe and routine operation. Every pilot has practiced it hundreds of times. (Details below.7)
For a pilot at a small “uncontrolled” airport, which is the vast majority in the United States, the decision to go around is one you make yourself. You do so if anything about the landing doesn’t seem right. A flock of birds appears. You’re too high or too low. Once I went around when a fully antlered deer strolled onto the runway. It’s always better to give yourself another chance.
At airports with control towers, like nearly all served by airlines, it’s the controller’s call. That was the call the controller made, twice, at DCA. She saw that an Army helicopter was straying into a realm of possible danger; she knew what had happened at DCA just months earlier; she decided to give everyone another chance.
By far the best depiction of what happened, and why, comes again from VASAviation, run by a pilot based in Brazil. I’ll save a blow-by-blow for the footnotes.8 But if you want second-by-second info on what happened, this VASAviation annotated animation is superb:
Since this episode, a former MTV reality-show star who is now Secretary of Transportation (Sean Duffy) has been feuding with a former Fox News weekend host who is now Secretary of Defense (Pete Hegseth) about whose organization was more to blame. My point for now is to recognize the aplomb of the DCA tower controller, and of the Delta and Republic flight crews who calmly followed her instructions.