NEWARK (1010 WINS) -- Newark Airport experienced a brief radar outage early Friday morning—the latest outage to hit the airport in the past couple weeks.
The Federal Aviation Administration confirmed the outage in a statement, saying preliminary information appeared to show it lasted 90 seconds. That’s similar to what happened on April 28.
"There was a telecommunications outage that impacted communications and radar display at Philadelphia TRACON Area C, which guides aircraft in and out of Newark Liberty International Airport airspace. The outage occurred around 3:55 a.m. on Friday, May 9, and lasted approximately 90 seconds."
Air traffic controllers told a FedEx plane that had just taken off at 3:55 a.m. that their screens had gone dark.
“FedEx 1989, I'm going to hand you off here. Our scopes just went black again,” the air traffic controller said, according to LiveATC.net. “If you care about this, contact your airline and try to get some pressure for them to fix this stuff.”
An arriving private jet was also told the airport had experienced a temporary outage and to stay above 3,000 feet in case communication was lost, according to another LiveATC transmission.
"There is another brief radar outage, so just in case that happens again, for your purposes if you can't reach me, just stay at or above 3,000," a controller said.
Meanwhile, the FAA issued a brief ground stop at the airport on Friday morning due to construction. As of 11:30 a.m., there were 246 delays and 74 cancellations at the airport.
Friday's radar incident came just a day after the Trump administration announced Thursday that it would replace the nation’s aging air traffic control system, some of which still operates using outdated copper wires instead of fiber optic lines.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said many of the existing radar systems at airports date back to the 1980s or even 1970s, so they need to be replaced.
Some of the shortcomings of the current system have been on display at Newark Airport over the past two weeks.
The air traffic control center in Philadelphia that directs planes in and out of Newark lost its radar signal for between 30 and 90 seconds on April 28, meaning air traffic controllers couldn't tell where planes were temporarily.
After the breakdown, a number of controllers took leave under a contract provision that allows them to step away after experiencing a traumatic event on the job. Having those controllers on leave exacerbated staff shortages at the facility.
That outage led to hundreds of flights being canceled or delayed at Newark Airport in the past two weeks after the FAA slowed down traffic at the airport to ensure safety.
It appears that the source of the problem was a breakdown in the lines carrying radar data from a facility in New York to the air traffic controllers in Philadelphia.
The FAA is already working on replacing those lines with fiber optic ones and training more controllers to improve the situation in Newark.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.