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Duffy Provides an Update on Newark Airport, May 12, 2025

May 12, 2025 · US Department of Transportation · 0:32:14

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy provided an update on Newark Airport, in the Department of Transportation’s upload of the May 12, 2025 briefing, alongside the FAA’s acting administrator, as he introduced him. Duffy laid out how the problem was created as he stated the history: in July 2024 the prior administration’s FAA moved control of the New York airspace from New York to the Philadelphia TRACON, but the STARS system processing radar data for Newark stayed based in New York, and the telecom lines feeding that data were not hardened in the move — issues in October and November of that year, he said, had already shown the hardware would keep causing problems.

He then gave the spring’s outage record as he stated it: equipment issues at Philadelphia on April 28, May 9, and May 11; the April 28 and May 9 outages lasted about 30 seconds for the radar data, with the displays taking about another 60 seconds to reboot — the source, he said, of the 30-versus-90-second discrepancy in reporting. On Friday night the FAA implemented a software update to prevent future outages, and on Sunday the test came: the main line went down, the redundant line stood up, and the fix worked, as he stated the result — controllers, out of an abundance of caution, shut down the airspace for 45 minutes even though scopes and telecom were functioning on the redundant line, as he described it. He closed the technical picture with the system’s age as he stated it: the equipment is so old that even high-speed fiber data has to be slowed to copper-wire speed.

Why it matters

The May 12 briefing is the Newark campaign’s diagnostic record — the 2024 airspace move identified as the origin, the outage arithmetic settled on the record, and the first verified success of the fix, a redundant line that held under a real failure the morning after the patch.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard watch: the FAA software update and redundant-line performance at Newark as briefed May 12, 2025, between the April–May outages and the fiber rebuild reported May 28. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: U.S. Department of Transportation, “Secretary Duffy Provides Update on Newark Airport” (official upload, embedded above). Remarks and figures as delivered by Secretary Duffy at the briefing.