NEWARK INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT’S RADAR SCREENS GO DARK
If you've been following the news lately, you might have heard that there have been "air traffic control incidents" at the busy international airport in Newark, New Jersey. The "incidents" have followed revelations of a number of "issues" involving air traffic safety in the United States. Only recall the tragic collision of a military helicopter and a civilian airliner at Washington DC's Reagan National Airport, an "accident" that I personally do not yet think has been adequately explained. In the case of Newark International, these incidents have involved its air traffic control system, which appears to have been "blanking out" for periods of time, the most recent incident being a 90 second outage of radar contact! If you've been following this crazy story, you'll be aware that there's all sorts of explanations being floated, from near-obsolescent, if not obsolete, equipment, to the computer programs that run the Air Traffic at Newark being on floppy disk media (I kid you not!). That's rather like saying that Air Traffic Control at Newark International is being run by an old Commodore 64 desk top computer. It probably won't be able to keep up, but at least it has cute noises and beeps it can make when something goes wrong. Seriously, though, I have no difficulty believing that the United States' air traffic control and airport ground control infrastructures are in need of a serious upgrade and renewal. If you've traveled by land or rail in this country, you'll know that our bridges and roads are a bumpy, deteriorating, pot-holed mess for the most part. Now translate those asphalt temporary patches and potholes to the air traffic control infrastructure, and you get the idea. It's a mess. And it's a mess for a very simple reason: you cannot go to war with everyone on the planet and maintain 700 military bases all over the world, and have a nice up to date domestic infrastructure. The costs of empire are always domestic degradation.
But I strongly suspect there may be something else, and more sinister, in play here, as is suggested by this article shared by R.G.(with our gratitude):
Radar screens that serve troubled Newark Liberty International Airport briefly go dark
You'll note that the article makes it clear that there have been numerous such incidents at Newark International: radios going down (not to mention the radar), and each incident is traceable to faulty, and doubtless out-of-date, overused equipment:
Radar screens servingNewark Liberty International Airport went black early Friday
morning, raising more air traffic safety concerns at the busy New Jersey hub, federal authorities said.The outage shortly before 4 a.m. EDT lasted only 90 seconds on a limited number of sectors, the FAA said, but the blackout is still a troubling development in the wake of revelations that controllers lost radio contact with pilots flying into the airport in recent months.
The difficulties were traced to Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) network out of Philadelphia.
"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," according to an FAA statement. "The outage occurred around 3:55 a.m. on Friday, May 9, and lasted approximately 90 seconds."
A current veteran controller said the situation is getting worse by the day.
“It’s a s--- show, the controller told NBC News. "There’s new stuff every day. We work with a monkey on our back, knowing our equipment is not reliable. It’s like driving your car, knowing the brakes will go out any time.” (Emphasis added)
Keep that telecommunications outage that impacted the Philadelphia regional control in mind, because you might recall another similar incident a few years ago that occurred to the Salt Lake City Air traffic control. (q.v.
And just so we're all on the same page of high octane speculation here, recall the recent power outages in Western Europe that hit Spain, Portugal, portions of France, and left footprints allegedly as far away as the Great Britain and Poland. That story too had some interesting antecedents:
So herewith my high octane speculation of the day: I do not think Newark International airport's air traffic control difficulties are simply do to crumbling, obsolescent infrastructure and equipment. The difficulties are certainly traceable to that as one, but only one, source of the problem. And the reason is relatively simple to figure out: with such obsolescent equipment, cyber attacks and hacking are made much easier. One can, as happened in Salt Lake City, as I pointed out years ago in that incident, take out the entire regional air traffic control, thus grounding planes. Add to this those curious incidents of direct attacks on internet and electrical grid hardware in California and Arizona a few years ago, attacks that have every indication of having been professional operations, and one gets the idea. such repeated incidents at Newark International suggest that more is involved than just malfunctioning, old equipment. After all, new parts for such equipment can be supplied. It is the persistent nature of the types of problems - failing telecommunications connections to regional air traffic control, radar suddenly going down, radio communications gone - that suggests more than just system-wide equipment failure. It really suggests targeting over time.
It's a national security issue.
And rest assured, if we can think of it, they already have, and are simply not talking about it. Imagine what admitting that hackers, working for "whomever", are causing these incidents would do to the air travel industry in this country, and you get the idea...
See you on the flip side...
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