Air traffic controllers in Denver scramble to use backups after losing communications Monday

Air traffic controllers in Denver lost communications with planes around that major airport for seconds earlier this week and had to scramble to use backup frequencies in the latest Federal Aviation Administration equipment failure The outage at Denver International Airport happened Monday afternoon and affected communications not radar the FAA s head of air traffic control Frank McIntosh declared during a House hearing Thursday This communications failure follows two high-profile outages of radar and communications in the past weeks at a facility that directs planes in and out of the Newark New Jersey airport The FAA revealed in a declaration that the Denver Air Way Traffic Control Center lost communications for approximately seconds McIntosh reported both the primary and main backup frequencies went down so the controllers had to turn to an crisis frequency to communicate Controllers used another frequency to relay instructions to pilots Aircraft remained safely separated and there were no impacts to operations the FAA noted Rep Robert Garcia of California recounted McIntosh during the hearing that anytime there s these outages which are happening now more regularly it s very concerning We know that there are staffing and equipment problems at air traffic control Garcia announced We know that the problems have gone back decades in selected cases but it s still an absolutely shocking system failure and we need immediate solutions The Denver communications failure is the latest troubling equipment failure in the system that keeps planes safe Last week the Trump administration released a multibillion-dollar plan to overhaul an air traffic control system that relies on antiquated equipment The Newark airport has generally led the nation in flight cancellations and delays ever since its first radar outage on April that also lasted about seconds A second outage happened on May In both those instances controllers lost both radar and communications The FAA was in the middle of a second day Thursday of meetings with the airlines that fly out of Newark about cutting flights because there aren t enough controllers to handle all the flights on the schedule now More than flights have been canceled at Newark Thursday Representatives developed the plan to upgrade the system after a deadly midair collision in January between a guest jet and an Army helicopter killed people in the skies over Washington D C Several other crashes this year also put pressure on leaders to act