© Allan Jung/Telegram & Gazette / USA TODAY NETWORK
(Washington, DC) — Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is set to announce Thursday his plan for overhauling the nation’s air traffic control system. This comes amidst continuing delays at Newark Liberty Airport resulting from communication blackouts and a shortage of air traffic controllers.
Duffy has offered glimpses of the plan saying in recent interviews the system would have new telecom, new radars and new infrastructure. The feds plan to increase controller staff, add new high bandwidth telecommunications connections between towers, and replace copper connections with fiberoptic technology.
Last week, air traffic controller screens at Newark went dark for 30 seconds — cutting off all communication between airplanes and controllers. Duffy blamed the outage on a frail system. In response, air-traffic controllers took 45-day trauma leave.
