US Officials Weigh Broad Pullback in Newark Airport Flights

Watch US Officials Weigh Broad Pullback in Newark Airport Flights - Bloomberg on Dailymotion

Transcript

00:00The breaking news that we had a little while ago from our Bloomberg reporter citing people

00:03familiar with the situation that the FAA is now ready to consider additional cutbacks at Newark

00:09Airport, basically the number of flights that go in and out of that airport in a way to sort of

00:14match the number of flights with the decrease that we've had in the number of flight controllers

00:19operating out of there. Joining us right now is Bloomberg's Ryan Bean to talk a little bit more

00:24about what we know. And Ryan, what do we know when we talk about staffing levels there? Where are we?

00:30Well, nationwide, there's a pretty pronounced shortage of air traffic controllers. Right now

00:36there are about 10,700 certified controllers, which is about 3,000 shy of what U.S. officials have said

00:45are really ideal levels. The situation in the Philadelphia facility that routes planes in and

00:51out of Newark is a little bit more dire. It's closer to, I believe we've reported closer to 20 or so

00:59and that's down from closer to more than 30 back when that traffic was routed from a facility in

01:07New York State. Okay. So yeah, I mean, the lack of personnel is definitely one issue here. And we've

01:14had a couple of instances, the two outages inside two weeks, Ryan, that has really raised a lot of

01:19concerns. What kind of timeline are we talking about here if they're going to decrease the number of

01:24flights coming in and out of Newark? Is this a temporary solution? Is there talk of some longer

01:30term adjustment to the number of flights? Because hiring people, getting them trained up and getting

01:36them into Philadelphia and fixing all the technical problems behind the outages is not something that's

01:40going to be solved anytime soon. No, that's right. And look, there's a number of things going on here.

01:46So what we just reported a few moments ago is that U.S. officials plan to meet with airline executives

01:54in the coming weeks, we anticipate, to discuss further reductions at Newark. Flight levels are

02:02already down there just due to just the aforementioned staffing shortages and runway construction.

02:11But beyond that, there's also efforts underway to try to fix some of the aging technology,

02:15both at the Philadelphia facility that handles much of Newark's traffic and nationally. The FAA on

02:21Wednesday said that they were going to be speeding multiple types of infrastructure and

02:27telecommunications improvements at that Philadelphia facility. Caroline Levitt, White House press

02:33secretary, earlier today said that the goal there is to have that physical work at that particular

02:38facility done by the end of the summer. And now beyond that, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy

02:44earlier, on Thursday, forgive me, announced a sweeping broad plan to more fulsomely overhaul the

02:52nation's air traffic control system. He said that it would involve maybe some construction, but largely

02:57just replacing and upgrading and installing new modern equipment to replace this, what is really,

03:05you know, fairly, what a lot of people would consider ancient. I mean, we're talking about floppy disks,

03:10paper strips, old mainframe type computers that are not what most people would consider to be modern.