Flights from JFK, LaGuardia resume, but Newark remains grounded after equipment outage

It was a messy transit day for travelers with flights on Monday, after several northeast airports closed and reopened due to an equipment outage, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

The Federal Aviation Administration issued a ground stop at Newark, LaGuardia and JFK International Airports Monday morning due to an equipment outage, according to an agency advisory.

Flights into Philadelphia International Airport and Teterboro Airport were also paused, the agency said.

United States Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on social media said that an Amtrak construction crew “accidentally cut into a fiber line in New Jersey which caused a telecom outage and forced FAA to pause flights in the northeast.”

By mid-afternoon, flights had resumed at LaGuardia and JFK airports, while flights into Newark were still paused, according to the FAA website. Flights into Philadelphia and Teterboro had briefly resumed before being paused once again.

Earlier in the day, a spokesperson for the FAA said the ground stops at Newark, Philadelphia and Teterboro were issued due to issues with some frequencies at Philadelphia TRACON or Terminal Radar Approach Control— an air traffic control facility that guides aircrafts as they’re approaching and departing, typically covering a 30 to 50 mile radius. It’s unclear if the two issues were connected.

“This incident underscores the need for additional funding to modernize aging infrastructure and prevent disruptions like this in the future,” he said.

The flight fiasco happened on the same day Duffy announced a new “cutting-edge tool” intended to reduce delays and cancellations called SMART or the Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories that centralizes 200 data streams into one platform using Artificial Intelligence.

Flights at JFK and LaGuardia were delayed by an average of 72 minutes and 42 minutes, respectively, according to the FAA website.

More than 1,200 flights into or out of the three airports had been impacted as of Monday afternoon, according to the tracking service FlightAware. It is unclear when passengers with departures from the affected airports can expect flights to resume.

This story was updated with new information from the FAA.