A portion of the Denver Air Route Traffic Control Center — which covers airspace in multiple states – experienced a 90-second loss of communications late Monday, the Federal Aviation Administration said.
At approximately 1:50 p.m. local time on Monday, both transmitters that cover a segment of airspace went down, causing controllers to use another frequency to relay instructions to pilots, the FAA said in a preliminary statement on Thursday.
“Aircraft remained safely separated and there were no impacts to operations,” according to the FAA.
It’s unclear what caused the outage. The FAA is currently investigating.
The Denver Air Route Traffic Control Center covers approximately 285,000 square miles of airspace, encompassing all or part of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana, according to its website.
The outage comes after weeks of staffing issues and reported outages have impacted Newark Liberty International Airport. Five controllers took a 45-day trauma leave after an outage on April 28 caused their radar screens to go blank for 90 seconds and their radios to go out for 30 seconds during the busy afternoon.
Two similar incidents have occurred at Newark’s airport within the last week. On Sunday morning, the FAA said it implemented a ground stop for flights heading to Newark because of a “telecommunications issue.” Last Friday, another 90-second-long radar and radio outage happened early in the morning at the Terminal Radar Approach Control Facilities.
The ongoing situation at Newark Airport revealed outages hit in October and November.
“I believe the system is safe,” US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said at a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing Thursday. “There are multiple redundancies throughout the system that keep people safe. Even the frustrations in Newark when we’ve slowed traffic down, the key is not efficiency, the key is safety.”
