Flights at several major airports in the Northeast are experiencing significant disruptions Monday afternoon after a Federal Aviation Administration equipment malfunction.
The delays impacted departures and arrivals out of Philadelphia International Airport, LaGuardia Airport, John F. Kennedy International Airport, Newark Liberty International Airport and Teterboro Airport.
The ground stop notice was holding up flights from two to three hours on average at Northeast airports, and the malfunctions were already impacting regional traffic as far as the Midwest. D.C.-area airports were reporting normal status, with delays lasting 15-minutes or less.
The FAA issued the ground stop notice following a radio and communications failure at the Philadelphia TRACON air traffic control facility. When air traffic controllers switched to a backup system, they discovered that an Amtrak construction crew had accidentally cut into a fiber optic line in New Jersey, FAA officials said.
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The accident triggered a widespread communications outage that forced the FAA to pause flights in the Northeast, FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said.
“That fiber break is probably 13 hours to repair. It’s massive,” Bedford told CBS.
Officials estimated repairs could continue into Tuesday morning.
At around 2:50 p.m., Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that operations were set to resume out of La Guardia and Philadelphia but flights from Newark, JFK and Teterboro Airport were still paused.
“This incident underscores the need for additional funding to modernize aging infrastructure and prevent disruptions like this in the future,” Duffy wrote Monday on X.
Last week, Bedford asked Congress for an additional $10 billion to modernize the nation’s “aging and unreliable” air traffic control system, which has contributed to increased flight delays in recent years.
This story has been updated with further information on the cause of the delays.
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