The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced on Friday that it would restrict the number of arrivals and departures at Newark Liberty International Airport through the end of the year.
Newark has been plagued with air traffic controller staffing shortages and telecommunications issues for months.
The agency will limit the number of arrivals and departures at the airport to 34 per hour on weekdays until October 25th.
It will limit the number of arrivals and departures during runway construction on weekends to 28 per hour from September 1st through December 31st.
FAA slashes flights in, out of Newark Airport through end of 2025 https://t.co/E7Mx8g9WoA pic.twitter.com/ENn6L2riNe
— New York Post (@nypost) June 7, 2025
Per Gothamist:
While partial work on the runway concluded ahead of schedule last week, officials said weekend work would resume after the summer travel season, from Fridays at 11 p.m. through Sundays at 5 a.m.
ADVERTISEMENTThe finalized limits follow a hellish month of delays and cancellations for travelers through Newark. Thousands of flights were disrupted due to chronic staffing shortages at the airport’s air traffic control center in Philadelphia as well as critical technology outages and the runway closure, which lasted nearly two months. Federal officials initially implemented the flight caps last month to address congestion at Newark.
“The FAA is looking to try to get ahead of the kind of chaos we saw when the runway was fully closed 24/7,” aviation analyst Jason Rabinowitz said Sunday. “This was always the plan, except the FAA’s mitigation plan going into this was quite insufficient, unfortunately, so now they’ve kind of had to go back after the fact and retool things a bit.”
The weekend limits starting in September will likely affect end-of-year holiday travel, including for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Newark is one of the busiest airports in the country and welcomed almost 49 million travelers last year, when holiday travel set new records at airports across the region, according to the Port Authority.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy visited Newark upon completion of the runway.
“Newark’s runway is reopened for business,” Duffy said.
“13 days ahead of schedule!” he added.
WATCH:
Newark’s runway is reopened for business…13 days ahead of schedule!
Thank you @PANYNJ, @FAA_Chris, and @United CEO Scott Kirby for making this happen! We’ll continue to ensure flying is safe and efficient in Newark and across the board. pic.twitter.com/8OMw5dbQ28
— Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) June 3, 2025
From the New York Post:
Runway 4L-22R, which shut down on April 15 after the FAA deemed it unsafe and ordered a $121 million repair project, reopened Monday, 13 days ahead of schedule. The closure had left just two open runways.
The FAA last month cut Newark’s flight capacity to 56, a fraction of the 80-plus that used to fly in and out, during the project that had left just two open runways.
ADVERTISEMENTThe New Jersey airport has been embroiled in disaster after disaster this year, ranging from air traffic controller shortages to inexplicable technology glitches on top of the endless work.
The mass chaos has left thousands of travelers stranded ever since the first tech disaster on April 28 saw a burnt-out copper wire spark a full-on blackout at the airport.
Many pointed fingers at United Airlines, which makes up 75% of all Newark’s flight traffic, and accused it of overcrowding the airport — prompting the carrier’s CEO to vow that travel at the embattled airfield would be the “cheapest” they’ve ever been this summer.
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