The chronic delays and frightening service outages that have plagued Newark Liberty International Airport over the last month can be directly traced to decades of deferred maintenance to the region's archaic air traffic control systems, according to federal records and aviation experts.

The roughly 3,000 passenger and cargo flights in and out of Newark every day are routed through a patchwork of aging technology that includes computers that rely on floppy disks and hundreds of miles of outdated copper wires that transmit crucial flight path data.

Federal aviation officials and watchdogs have for years said the entire country's 1970s-era flight control infrastructure is in dire need of an upgrade. But the problems with the equipment have come to a head in recent months at Newark, where they're compounded by a shortage of air traffic controllers and an ongoing runway reconstruction that's caused a bottleneck at the airport.

Problems with that aging equipment caused the radar and communications systems at the Federal Aviation Administration's Philadelphia control center — where Newark's airspace is managed — to go offline for an estimated 90 seconds at least twice over the last month, according to federal reports. The outages traumatized air traffic controllers: The union representing the workers said many employees at the facility went on leave after each incident, worsening a staffing shortage among air traffic controllers for Newark's airspace that's lingered for years.

"If you lose one or both of your critical primary tools to perform your job, and you know that those aircraft are flying at speeds up to 250 miles an hour converging on each other, that is stressful," said Michael McCormick, a retired air traffic control supervisor who worked for the FAA for 33 years.

© Federal Aviation AdministrationThe air traffic control center in Philadelphia where flights in and out of Newark Airport are managed.

The airspace around Newark used to be managed at the FAA's terminal radar approach control — or TRACON — facility in Westbury, Long Island, where flight traffic at LaGuardia and Kennedy airports is also managed. The facility has also faced staffing problems for decades, according to McCormick.

To help the staffing problems at Westbury, the FAA in 2024 decided to instead manage all of Newark's flights from its Philadelphia TRACON.

But the people controlling Newark's flights in Philadelphia still rely on technology and data that's ported over from Long Island through an interstate system of old copper communications cables, which federal officials have said must be replaced with modern fiber optic cables.

"It's kind of like our old phone systems in the house, the landline-based systems, copper wire-based systems. A lot of the [air traffic control] telecommunication is still based upon copper-based communication lines," said aviation law expert Jason Matzus. "We've long ago transitioned in our homes from that type of communication line infrastructure to fiber optics, and that's what the FAA needs to do."

McCormick said that technology is what caused the radar and communication systems for Newark flights to go offline.

• Leftist Colorado Gov. Jared Polis calls violent migrant gang takeover of apartments 'imagination'
• Aurora officials identify 10 Tren De Arague gang members linked to apartment takeovers amid governor's denial
• Colorado resident slams media for downplaying Venezuelan gangs after being forced from apartment complex: 'Slap in the face'

• Is Green Energy REALLY green?
• 'Green' energy is a Scam. It isn't MEANT to work.
• The energy transition ain't happening: The "green" economy is in retreat
• The Green New Deal has its roots in the genocidal goals of the Club of Rome and 1001 Trust