Why Philadelphia’s air traffic control tower is fueling national anxiety over flying

A fried piece of copper wire triggered a blackout on April 28 within the vast interstate communications network that connects Philadelphia’s air traffic control tower and the Newark Liberty International Airport.

Radar screens in the Philadelphia TRACON, the tower that oversees regional airspace, went blank. And for a minute and a half, air traffic controllers there lost contact with pilots circling the northern New Jersey travel hub 90 miles away.

It happened again on May 9, two of several recent outages that have fueled anxiety over the nation’s archaic air traffic control system.

» READ MORE: Flights were reduced at Newark Airport amid outages and air traffic controller shortage

The glitches in the Philadelphia tower were limited to the Newark airspace and did not affect flights in and out of Philadelphia airports, according to the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA). But the troubles in the tower nonetheless offer a window into the chronic staffing woes and outdated technology that the Federal Aviation Administration is now rushing to fix.

Be warned: From 30,000 feet, the situation may look daunting to jittery travelers. FAA officials, the air traffic controllers union, aviation experts, and federal records suggest there is no instant cure ahead of the busy summer travel season.

Nearly one in five air traffic controller jobs are unfilled in the Philadelphia tower, forcing many staffers to work six-day workweeks with only three to four days off per month.

Controllers there shepherd more than 900 flights a day from airports across the region — all using a 23-year-old aircraft tracking system that federal transportation authorities in May declared too old to meet the complex needs of national airspace.

Crucial flight path data is still being transmitted across hundreds of miles of copper wire from the Philadelphia TRACON to Newark, which experts have likened to using a landline phone system.

And some flight data is still routed through a computer with a Windows 95 operating system — updated via floppy disk, said Nick Daniels, president of NATCA.

“Most Americans have more computing power in their pocket,” Daniels said.

» READ MORE: Five neighbors, four months later: How the Northeast Philly plane crash changed one street forever

Facing public uproar over the string of radar mishaps, catastrophic crashes, and near-misses, the FAA has begun to accelerate long-overdue upgrades, some of which could take years to complete. The FAA did not provide an estimated budget for the Philadelphia tower upgrades.

Yet flying in and out of Philadelphia airports remains remarkably safe.

Since 1985, federal authorities have investigated just 54 accidents involving aircraft in Philadelphia airspace, with fewer than half resulting in injuries, according to an Inquirer analysis of federal records. For comparison, state transportation data show the city saw at least 351,000 car crashes resulting in injuries in that period, with over 4,600 deaths.

Only three of those plane accidents in Philadelphia resulted in deaths. That includes January’s disastrous crash of a Learjet medical plane in Northeast Philadelphia that killed seven people — the deadliest aviation incident in Philadelphia in at least six decades.

Records show Philadelphia’s air traffic controllers were not cited as a cause in those accidents. Pilot error and aircraft mechanical failures caused most major crashes.

“It’s like 20 times safer than driving yourself to the airport,” said Kit Darby, an aviation consultant and career pilot who has logged over 23,000 flight hours. “It’s wonderfully safe. But the perception from the public is that it’s becoming dramatically less safe.”

Here is a rundown of the issues that have put the Philadelphia tower in the spotlight:

The Philadelphia TRACON adopted air traffic controllers from Newark to combat a staffing shortage during the pandemic.

The Newark site was experiencing a low success rate for trainees, with only three out of 10 air traffic controller trainees completing their certification there, according to the FAA.

Philadelphia, by contrast, certified nearly eight out of 10 controllers.

The FAA cannot just move people from one facility to another when there are shortages. Training air traffic controllers is time-consuming, and ultra-busy areas like Newark require specialized knowledge. Daniels said the move to Philly required 17 controllers to spend two years training in the Philadelphia tower.

But trying to fix the long-standing problem of staffing exposed another fault — long-distance communication.

The FAA still relies on a copper-wire network to transmit data between the Philadelphia metro and New York metro areas.

Daniels said the amount of data being transmitted is too much for the wires — and it can’t carry the load, leading to short-outs.

“It’s such a vast network,” he said of the system nationwide. “You’re talking millions of miles of wiring, and making any changes will take place over a three-to-four-year period.”

To that end, the FAA plans to replace copper connections between the two airspaces with updated fiber-optic lines and deploy a temporary backup system. That process began last month with Verizon installing a new feed between Philly and Newark, an FAA spokesperson said.

Those upgrades are part of an overhaul to the national air traffic control system that will cost tens of billions over the next decade. But the upgrade timeline remains hazy, and aviation experts warn that a full makeover could be years away due to the nonstop operations of national airspace.

The software and hardware in the towers themselves are also badly outdated.

In 2002, Philadelphia’s air traffic control tower was the first in the country to adopt the Standard Terminal Automation Replacement System (STARS).

STARS was hailed as an aviation milestone, officials said at the time, synchronizing data from the FAA’s vast radar network and tracking as many as 1,350 aircraft at a time over a 60-mile radius from Philadelphia.

The system took 18 years to roll out nationwide, according to the FAA, with rolling upgrades.

Today, the system is riddled with “inefficiencies, high costs, and integration challenges” within the increasingly busy national airspace, according to a report issued last month by the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Ancient software adds to the strain on air traffic controllers, Daniels said.

He said air traffic controllers use a Windows 95 terminal and navigate a series of archaic menus to locate data about specialized landings or military aircrafts. An FAA spokesperson disputed that the 1995 operating system was still in use. (Microsoft stopped offering technical support for this system — a standard in the days of dial-up internet — in December 2001.)

Daniels said the short-staffed and overworked controllers also must print out information to relay to other facilities, which is “an extremely inefficient way of doing our job.”

Aviation experts agreed the technology needs to be modernized, but emphasized that momentary communications issues with the tower are rarely a matter of life and death.

Arthur Alan Wolk, a Philadelphia-based aviation attorney and pilot, noted that backup communications systems have been introduced over the last decade — including a text message-based network between pilots and nearby towers.

“The system has not been left to rot,” he said. “It’s not as if the ATC loses radar and you’re about to have a collision — it’s just not true.”

The Philadelphia TRACON had 95 certified air traffic controllers out of 114 budgeted positions as of last year. That represents a 17% vacancy rate.

Five of the 22 air traffic controllers assigned to Newark took trauma leave following the April communications outages, and an additional controller was placed on medical leave, according to the FAA. That left just 16 controllers to run Newark operations from Philadelphia as of last month.

“Everybody already knows it’s a stressful job,” Daniels said. “It absolutely takes its toll in a multitude of ways — morale, fatigue, the ability to make millions of decisions every day, and then, on top of that, the outdated equipment and the scrutiny on aviation and federal employees.”

Daniels said staffing levels for the Philadelphia airspace are sufficient — even if the conditions are grueling.

In addition to 60-hour workweeks, annual vacation allotments range from 13 days for new recruits to 26 days for veteran controllers. And time-off requests must be approved a year in advance.

“Part of this job is missing out,” Daniels said. “If my brother is going to get married two months from now, I likely won’t be able to go. They won’t release me.”

NATCA also recently signed an agreement with the FAA to recruit more members and implement a 20% bonus for controllers who defer their retirement up to three years.

Flights have been reduced at Newark to help the fatigued and shorthanded controller staff. The FAA did not respond to request for comment on possible delays at Philadelphia airports this summer.

This article contains information from the Associated Press.