Donald Trump’s Secretary of Transportation assured flyers that Newark’s airport remains a safe destination on Sunday while noting that his agency did temporarily scale back the number of flights while experts investigated “glitches” affecting air traffic control at the New Jersey airport.
Sean Duffy appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday and sounded the alarm bells about America’s commercial and official airspace, which he says in many instances relies on outdated technology and necessitates an update to key systems and facilities.
Since January, the public has been on high alert regarding aviation-related incidents. The deadly crash involving a US military helicopter and a descending American Airlines flight approaching Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in D.C. on January 29 was the deadliest incident for American commercial air travel since 2001.
On Sunday morning, flights were once again grounded at Newark Liberty International Airport for nearly an hour due to a glitch that affected air traffic control equipment. Consecutive outages have affected the abilities of controllers at the airport to see flights on radar or contact pilots through radio.
Separate instances of near-misses at several airports and the low-speed collision of two commercial jets carrying several members of Congress in April further rattled public confidence; as did a sight-seeing helicopter crashing in the Hudson River in April killing an entire family and the pilot, and a commercial jet which flipped upside-down upon landing in Toronto in February. Major air carriers have reported drops in ticket sales.
“It is” safe to fly in and out of Newark, Duffy assured NBC’s Kristen Welker on Sunday.
“Do you need to scale back flights coming in and out of Newark while you are addressing these glitches, these problems that are so potentially dangerous?” asked Welker
“One hundred percent,” Duffy responded. “So we actually have brought down the number of airplanes that come in and leave Newark because, listen — our mission is safety.”
Duffy went on to insist that the United States still oversaw the safest airspace in the world — but one that would be increasingly put to the test by aging equipment and systems in the coming years if efforts to bring it up to the modern era were not implemented.
“I'm concerned about the whole airspace,” the secretary told NBC.
“The equipment that we use, much of it we can't buy parts for new. We have to go on eBay and buy parts if one part goes down,” he explained. “You're dealing with really old equipment. We're dealing with copper wires, not fiber, not high-speed fiber. And so this is concerning. Is it safe? Yes, we have redundancies, multiple redundancies in place to keep you safe when you fly. But we should also recognize we're seeing [...] stress on an old network, and it's time to fix it.”
Demand for domestic air travel around the U.S. has plummeted in recent months, driven by a combination of recession fears, safety concerns and other factors. Demand for international flights to the U.S. has also dropped amid the rollout of a number of policies driven by President Donald Trump, including his sharp hikes on tariff rates for many close U.S. trading partners and remarks from Trump administration officials including JD Vance seen as insulting to U.S. allies.
Many travelers have also been spooked by rumors that U.S. border officials are or will begin screening travelers for dissenting political views or speech, something which US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) was forced to deny in a statement.
“Trump’s policies and pronouncements have produced a negative sentiment shift toward the U.S. among international travellers,” read an analysis from the research group Tourism Economics. “The correlating decline in international travel to the U.S. is expected to be strongest in 2025, with persisting degrees of impact throughout the remainder of Trump’s second term.”
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