Your Flight Delay Is Probably New York's Fault

0:05If you were stranded in an airport over Thanksgiving weekend, or sitting on the tarmac for a long time, waiting to take off, there's a pretty good chance you can blame New York. New York has been a major bottleneck for years. That's our colleague Andrew Tangle. He covers aviation. It's some of the most complex airspace in the world, definitely in the country. So if you think about it, you've got Newark, you've got LaGuardia, you've got JFK, and you've got all these other little airports around them, like Teterboro and so forth, and they're all stacked on top of each other. And planes coming from all around the world, helicopters, sightseeing tours in Manhattan, it's all just right there together and there's not much space.

0:56It's kind of like a metaphor for New York City. And when the airspace in New York is congested, it has an outsized impact on the rest of the country. Airlines are finely tuned operations and once that's thrown off, It just sort of cascades through the nation's air travel system. The Federal Aviation Administration has estimated that as much as 75 % of the country's flight delays stem from problems related to New York. 75%. The reason there are so many delays around New York isn't just because it's a complicated airspace. It's also because there aren't enough air traffic controllers there. It's analogous to any profession where you have the same amount of workload and not enough people.

1:43When you've got too much on one controller's plate, the FAA, they basically, they slow air traffic down so that the controllers who are there can handle it safely. This summer, the FAA rolled out a bold plan in an effort to release this bottleneck. It took oversight of the airspace around Newark Airport, one of the big three airports in the New York area, and moved it to Philadelphia. But things are still a mess. It hasn't fixed the staffing issues yet, and it's introduced some new risks. And this big high-stakes move by the FAA raises the question of whether or not the cure, at least for now, is worse than the disease.

2:30Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knutson. It's Monday, December 2nd.

2:43Coming up on the show, the struggle to fix America's most complex airspace.

3:04When you think about air traffic controllers, you probably picture the people up in airport towers. But that's actually just part of the whole air traffic control ecosystem. There's actually different kinds of air traffic controllers for different layers of airspace. The people in the towers handle the planes that are the lowest altitude, basically right after takeoff or landing. The air traffic controllers that we're talking about today handle the airspace that's just above that, above takeoff and landing, but still below cruising altitude. And it's a really stressful job. The controllers have to make sure that they're lining up all the airplanes safely.

3:48They tell them where to go, where to turn, what altitude, what speed to go at, and they've got to juggle all this and sort of act like a conductor at an orchestra. These controllers don't always work at airports, because they don't need to look at planes in the sky. They work mostly off radar screens and other digital equipment. They're part of something called a TRACON, which stands for Terminal Radar Approach Control. There are TRACONs all over the country. For decades, the TRACON controllers in New York worked out of a windowless room on Long Island. It's this big building tucked in the suburbs of New York City out on Long Island in the town of Westbury.

4:29And it's called the New York Terminal Radar Approach Control. Or in air traffic control jargon, it's a TRACON.

4:43Working at any TRACON can be stressful. But the TRACON in New York stands apart. It's kind of the biggest, baddest TRACON in the whole country. Even the FAA's recruitment videos emphasized how tough the place is. There's an incredible operational challenge here. The complexity of the traffic, the volume. There's very little room for error. You've got to be spot on. There's a little bit of an adrenaline rush. You can be different every day. Oh, we're busy? All right, let's go. Let's move. Historically, it is known for having its own culture. People who've worked there historically have described it as a bit of a sort of a rough-and-tumble place where they sort of do things their own way.

5:20Some might say out of necessity because it's so difficult with all the airports stacked on top of each other. Rough and tumble edge. To say more about what that means, what was the culture like at this TRACON office? We've heard it described as sort of a place where you get told to suck it up and, you know, deal with. I think it's maybe symbolized in like the local New York Tracon graphic on social media with like the skeleton, you know, the skull with the headset. That's like the logo or like the mascot for the people that work there is like a skull and crossbones with a headset on it. Like we're like the pirates of air traffic control.

6:04Yeah, it's a tough place to work and a tough place to thrive. Kind of like New York, right? The rough-and-tumble culture at the New York TrayCon was even the subject of a 1990s movie featuring John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton called Pushing Tin. 140 Continental 962. American 7736, contact Newark Tower 118.3. Take care, thanks. Look, it's a bit silly and over the top, but it does capture the drama that can be part of the job. There's already a national shortage of air traffic controllers, but the staffing shortage is especially bad at the New York TrayCon. Over the years, its reputation as a particularly tough place to work has made it hard to recruit people.

6:48There's the question about whether or not the culture at the New York TRACON led to people not being successful in training, either because they couldn't cut it, they didn't like the environment, they didn't like Long Island. For whatever reason, new recruits from the academy were leaving at very high numbers. The air traffic controllers union declined to comment, as did a union rep for the New York TRACON. Earlier this year, the New York TRACON was running at 60 % of its targeted staffing. And, as we mentioned earlier, if there aren't enough air traffic controllers, the FAA has to throttle the number of flights.

7:32In an effort to fix the staffing shortages and the delays, the FAA came up with an audacious plan. It carved off oversight of the airspace around Newark Airport and transferred it to Philadelphia. And just to be clear, they aren't moving the actual airplanes, just the air traffic controllers. Basically, the FAA believed it had to break apart the New York TRACON. The agency hoped that the move would create new workplace dynamics. Philadelphia is also a more affordable city to live in, and the FAA thought that more air traffic controllers would want to live there. They went through with it basically on the theory that they will have a better job of recruiting new staff and getting them trained successfully in Philadelphia.

8:19How did the controllers union respond to this move? They opposed it. They pushed back. They raised safety concerns. We're going to increase an unknown risk into the system, and we need to minimize and keep delays down, and that's done by keeping everybody together in the same building. The local union leader saw this move of the Newark airspace down to Philadelphia as a way to undermine the union's control of the New York TRACON. Despite the pushback, the plan moved ahead. Earlier this year, the FAA moved 24 air traffic controllers from New York to Philadelphia. Some went voluntarily, but others were required to relocate.

8:57Four months later, the FAA says that by at least one measure, flight delays in the New York City region are down overall. But some things have gotten worse. For instance, delays have sharply increased around Newark's airspace. United Airlines said that in November alone, travel for nearly 350 ,000 passengers was disrupted because of the shortage of air traffic controllers. The FAA says that hiring more air traffic controllers is a top priority, and that relocating Newark's controllers to Philadelphia is a, quote, long-term solution to a long-term staffing challenge. But potentially more alarming are the tech issues that have cropped up.

9:39Tech issues that have risked some close calls. That's after the break.

9:58So far, moving oversight of Newark's airspace from New York to Philadelphia hasn't yet paid off. The Philadelphia setup is still short-staffed, and controllers are having to juggle multiple jobs. On top of that, the equipment that monitors the airplanes, like the radars, remains on Long Island, and the signal is now being transmitted to Philly. But that transmission hasn't always been reliable. The first major tech outage happened back in August. On the Tuesday before Labor Day, which is a very busy travel period, a controller overseeing Newark had a harrowing experience. So the controller's telling the pilots where to point the nose and how to get safely on the ground.

10:46He's got what they call targets on the screen, when all of a sudden... Attention all aircraft. Radar contact is lost. Radar contact is lost. Black. He can't see the aircraft. We're recovering from a radar outage right now, so I'm not going to be able to advise or provide the advisories at this time. So what does he do next? His radar screen goes black and then what? He goes to the backup. It's also black. Wow. For a controller, it's like having a bag over your head when you're going down the highway. According to the FAA, the blackout lasted less than a few minutes, during which time the controller had to rely on his memory to guide two planes.

11:30And was he able to get the planes down safely? Yeah, in the end, the radar came back, the planes landed safely, but this is a heart-stopping moment. How is it possible for something like this to happen? A contractor essentially pulled the wrong circuit and cut off the feed that was coming from Long Island. The blackout was just the first of several tech glitches related to this big move. A few weeks later, in October, the system overloaded ahead of Columbus Day. Radars kept flickering, which confused controllers who saw aircraft bouncing around on their screens. There were also failures with a system that's supposed to warn about potentially dangerous winds.

12:16And then, last month, another scare. The controllers' radios failed. They couldn't communicate easily with other facilities. Have you had a 50-60? Yeah, we have no answer on approach, so I don't know. It seems like he's not talking to anyone. One FedEx plane coming in for a landing at Newark missed its final approach because the controllers couldn't talk to them and flew potentially into oncoming traffic departing from LaGuardia. Now, the FAA has been dealing with this since then, but you can see how that episode could be really scary for controllers. Andrew says that after all these safety issues, morale in Philadelphia got even worse.

13:01One controller told me when they were on Long Island, we used to get our ass kicked once a week. Now we get our ass kicked every day. The FAA says that it's fixed the flickering radar screens and that it's ironed out problems for alerting about dangerous winds. So with all of these issues, how did things go over Thanksgiving weekend when there were more travelers than ever? Nationwide, Thanksgiving went relatively smoothly unless you flew via Newark. The FAA had to, at times, formally slow down flights to and from Newark because there were just too few controllers. And that staffing shortage was made worse recently because some of those controllers went on so-called trauma leave, which they're allowed to take after scary experiences, like having those radio failures earlier in November.

13:55Thanksgiving was just the first big test of the holiday travel season, though. So what do you expect over the next few weeks? There's a risk of disruption. You could face a significant delay departing from Newark, arriving at Newark, or leaving where you're flying from to go to Newark because they put in a ground stop or a delay so that you're stuck on the tarmac in San Francisco or wherever. So what does this story say about how safe we are as airline passengers in the U.S.? That is a difficult question to answer. The FAA and the Union for Controllers will always insist that they won't sacrifice safety for efficiency.

14:49There's a question of fatigue, and that's been an issue raised by the union over the last few years, that at some point, the system's going to break. If you're constantly working more because of the short staffing, it can lead to more close calls and, God forbid, something worse. What's the best-case scenario for this bold plan to relocate part of New York's TRACON to Philadelphia? I think if it's successful, people will go back to not thinking about it. If it's just part of the system, part of air travel that we take for granted, you'll see fewer delays in New York and around the country. You'll see more flights.

15:30And then presumably you'll see fewer close calls if some of the safety events are related to the staffing situation or any tech issues. The FAA says it still believes this will work. It says two dozen controllers are either training or about to enter training at Philadelphia to help with staffing. What will happen if this plan ultimately fails? I'm not sure what happens then. They could, I guess, go back to the old setup back in Long Island. But there's a lot riding on this for the FAA, airlines, passengers, and the country's transportation system. The real test is going to be a year from now, two years from now, three years from now.

16:17It's a big experiment that we're all sort of caught in the middle of.

16:35That's all for today. Monday, December 2nd. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We're out every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.