Port Authority officials said those flying out of Newark Liberty Airport should see fewer cancelled flights and less multi-hour flight delays now that federal restriction of flight volumes have been put in place.
Interim rules announced by the Federal Aviation Administration caps arriving and departing flights to 56 per hour through June 15. Between June 15 and Oct. 15, that number increases to 68 operations per hour, said Sarah McKeon, Port Authority aviation director. Prior to the reduction, up to 77 flights arrived and departed from Newark each hour.
Over the past month, Newark had over 2,000 flights canceled and 7,000 delays that averaged two hours, she said.
That affected “hundreds of thousands of passengers due to decades of under investment” by the FAA and federal government, she said.
“The best impact that is we should stop seeing the last minute cancelations due to FAA staffing challenges and that should allow people to best plan for what they need to do,” McKeon said.
Reducing flights will also “reduce the number of unplanned flight delays” for passengers, McKeon said.
The FAA will use the time to increase air traffic controller staffing levels and replace or repair air traffic control technology, she said.
“Airlines are making determinations about how they’ll achieve the reductions required by the FAA,” McKeon said.
It’s unlikely that more flights will be offered at LaGuardia and JFK airports because they have capacity limits, she said. But, airlines could use larger aircraft to carry more passengers to compensate for the Newark flight reductions, McKeon said.
Newark has been plagued by continuing shortages of air traffic controllers and a series of frightening outages at the air traffic control center handling flights to and from the airport, which led to blackouts of radio and radar coverage. The most recent happened on Monday, lasting seconds and did not impact flight traffic, officials said.
A switch in September 2024 of air traffic controllers who handle Newark Airport from New York to Philadelphia International Airport was done by the FAA without Port Authority input, she said.
Technical issues were exacerbated by reduced air traffic controller staffing levels, she said.
Before those problems starting in late April, runway repaving already led to ground delays of flights heading to Newark to limit the amount of traffic.
Estimated completion of the major runway paving work is June 15. McKeon said that project is on or ahead of schedule and could result in an earlier return to more normal flight capacity levels.
“We are working closely with the FAA to determine the benefit of delivering the program early to see if can get the capacity maximized with a return before June 15,” she said.
A 2021 project to rehabilitate Runway 4R-22L, which is Newark’s primary landing runway was completed five days ahead of schedule on Sept. 25, 2021.
In 2024, the authority’s airports smashed travel volume records set in 2019 and 2022 of 144 million passengers. Newark saw the highest increase at 6% over 2023 for a record 49.1 million passengers
In April, the authority’s airports saw the third-busiest period in agency history, said Rick Cotton, executive director. The problems at Newark resulted in “single digit” percent drops in volume, but it saw a 10% increase in international traffic last month, he said.
So far this year, 11 million passengers have taken 97,776 flights out of Newark Airport, according to statistics through March, authority statistics said. Cargo flights totaled 166,630 for the same period.
Aviation is the bi-state authority’s largest revenue earner, with estimated gross revenues of $3.9 billion this year. Of that, $1.74 billion comes from aviation fees, according to budget documents.
Balancing that is an estimated $2.19 billion cost to operate the airport in 2025, which doesn’t include capital cost for construction of new terminals, roads and other infrastructure.
“The impact on the revenue to the Port Authority is still being evaluated,“ McKeon said. ”As time goes on we will be able to understand what the potential impact is.”
The revenue for aircraft operations is based on the number of customers and the amount of weight an aircraft carries, she said.
United Airlines cut nearly three dozen round-trip flights from its daily schedule in and out of Newark. United is the airports largest airline and counts Newark among its hubs.
The failure of old technology in control towers that U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy compared to a flip phone, led to a proposal to do a massive national overhaul of air traffic control technology in three years. No cost has been calculated.
“There is a big focus on working with the FAA on restoring flight levels at Newark,” Cotton said.
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Larry Higgs may be reached at lhiggs@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on X @CommutingLarry
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