United Airlines has completed an “operational turnaround” at Newark Liberty International Airport after air traffic control problems and construction led to thousands of canceled flights earlier this year.
“Newark is operating better than ever and United’s future here is bright,” CEO Scott Kirby said according to a statement in advance of an event Tuesday morning at the airport. “As the FAA and DOT implement their plan of increased staffing and improved technology, the reliability and on-time performance of Newark will only get better.”
In April, the Federal Aviation Administration only had 24 “certified professional controllers” at the facility that handles flights approaching or departing Newark, but was supposed to have as many as 38.
Staffing took another hit during the busy afternoon on April 28, when controllers lost radio communication with planes for 30 seconds and could not see them on their radar scope for 90 seconds. As a result, five controllers took 45-day government trauma leave, exacerbating staffing shortages. Two similar outages happened over the following two weeks.
In May, the Federal Aviation Administration cut the number of flights allowed to fly into the “unacceptably congested” airport by about 25%, to 68 each hour, easing the workload on controllers and runway congestion. Through next summer the FAA plans to limit flights to 72 per hour, according to United.
“We’ve been begging the FAA to put slot controls on Newark for my entire career,” Kirby told CNN’s Richard Quest Tuesday. “When you have more flights than the FAA can handle at an airport, it leads to delays.”
He said the restrictions put in place on the number of flights “are why we just had the most reliable summer in the history of Newark Airport.”
But despite limitations on the number of flights United could fly at one of its key hubs, the airline was able to offer passengers more seats in and out of Newark than in the past by using larger aircrafts.
Six million people flew United on time through Newark this summer, the airline said in a statement, the most in the airline’s history. Initially, Kirby said the airline lost a lot of bookings, making it one of the cheapest summers to fly out of Newark.
“It was a very real issue for our customers,” Kirby told CNN. “It became very important to actually use that as the opportunity to permanently make the changes here at Newark with the air traffic control system and put Newark on an equal footing with LaGuardia and JFK.”
Weekday runway construction ended on June 2 and a pair of new fiber optic cables linking the facility with radar and communications equipment in New York was also installed, aimed at increasing reliability.
In the announcement, United said it was planning to add additional flights out of Newark to six international destinations and five domestic ones, as well as hiring 2,500 more staff based at the airport.
It’s not clear how the airline and the FAA will manage capacity with the additional flights.
CNN’s Pete Muntean, Alexandra Skores and Chris Isidore contributed to this report.
