Washington
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The Department of Transportation’s inspector general has opened an audit into the relocation of the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic control facility responsible for flights approaching or departing Newark Liberty International Airport.
The relocation, which stirred much controversy among controllers and their union, occurred last July when controllers monitoring flights landing at or departing from Newark were relocated from Long Island, New York, to Philadelphia. The move has faced repeated questions since April, when the facility experienced a series of radar and communication systems outages. The memorandum outlining the audit mentions two 90-second blackouts at the facility in the spring.
“These events have raised questions about FAA’s management of the relocation, including impacts on system redundancy, controller staffing and training, and operational resilience,” the memorandum reads. “Given these concerns, the Secretary of Transportation requested that we initiate an audit to review FAA’s decision to relocate TRACON responsibilities for this airspace.”
Although the move was completed under the Biden administration, documents reviewed by CNN show it was conceived during the first Trump administration, including an engineering plan completed one month before the 2020 election.
Despite this, President Donald Trump and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy have repeatedly blamed the Biden administration for the outages and problems.
Duffy previously defended the plan but said the Biden administration “bungled this move” by failing to properly harden the telecom lines the carry radar and other flight data from Newark’s airspace to the control facility in Philadelphia. “Without addressing the underlying infrastructure, they added more risk to the system,” Duffy said at a news conference earlier this year.
The audit will begin in August, according to the inspector general.
