Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on Monday blamed the Biden administration for not addressing getting old airport infrastructure, which he claims contributed to the terrifying radar and communications outage at Newark Liberty Worldwide Airport final week.
“We have really old infrastructure in America,” Duffy informed Fox Information host Laura Ingraham. “It hasn’t been updated in the last 30-40 years.”
“This should have been dealt with in the last administration — they did nothing,” the Trump administration official charged.
Newark airport has acquired greater than $170 million in federal funds for “runways, taxiways, safety and sustainability projects, as well as terminal, airport transit connections, and roadway projects,” since 2022.
However a fried piece of copper wire sparked a short lived radar and communications blackout for air visitors controllers overseeing the second-busiest airport within the New York metro space on April 28, leaving these within the tower “unable to see, hear, or talk to” planes within the sky, a Nationwide Air Visitors Controllers Affiliation spokesperson stated Monday.
Newark Airport has skilled lots of of flight cancellations and 1000’s of delays for the reason that disruption.
“The primary communication line went down, the backup line didn’t fire, and so for 30 seconds, we lost contact with air traffic control,” Duffy stated of the incident throughout his look on “The Ingraham Angle.”
“Were planes going to crash? No, they have communication devices. They can see other air traffic,” the transportation secretary continued.
“But it’s a sign that we have a frail system in place, and it has to be fixed.”
Duffy famous that whereas each communication strains at the moment are working, “less departures” can be going out of Newark “until we feel comfortable and safe that the system isn’t going to go down again.”
The previous congressman stated he hopes to get “all the airlines” that fly out of Newark to take part in departure discount efforts.
Duffy pledged to repair the infrastructure downside that led to the chaos and teased an announcement coming later this week to “radically remodel air visitors management operations.
“We are going to radically transform the way air traffic control looks,” Duffy stated. “We’re going to construct a model new air visitors management system, from new telecom to new radars to new infrastructure.
“This has been a problem in the decades coming, and we’re going to fix it,” he vowed.
He added that President Trump “loves” speaking airspace and airplanes and has “bought into” the plan set to be introduced on Thursday
