United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said recent Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) changes are helping to improve operations at Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR).
United’s chief said the agency has reformed operations at EWR and confirmed that the airport faces a “perception issue” in an interview at The Wall Street Journal’s (WSJ) Future of Everything festival with the outlet’s Kate Linebaugh on Thursday.
“This has been a huge perception issue, but it really is a perception issue. First, Newark is safe,” Kirby said. “The FAA has three levels of control for controlling airplanes, the tower, the [Terminal Radar Approach Control Facilities] and the center. They go in order.”
“And any time one of those has any kind of issue, goes down for any kind of reason, the others are there to back up. You just automatically flip over. That happens everywhere in the country — doesn’t happen often, but when it does it’s routine training to flip over,” he continued.
“The good thing about Newark is the FAA is now — I’ve tried for a decade to get the FAA to do this. They are going to own managing the airport capacity — to have the number of flights equal to the runway capacity at the airport,” the CEO said.
“Newark — we had the best weekend in history for reliability at Newark over the Memorial Day holiday,” Kirby said. “It’s likely going to be the most reliable. It’s going to have the highest of all-time performance of the New York airports this summer, because of the changes at the FAA.” (RELATED: Hundreds Of FAA Employees Hit Exit)
“It’s also, by the way, because we lost a lot of bookings and so there’s a lot more seats available — it’s going to be the cheapest it’s probably ever going to be in history … and it’s going to be the most crowded,” he jokingly added, noting the hit to his company’s profits.
EWR has experienced several incidents recently, including a blackout that impacted air traffic control for as much as 90 seconds on April 28. The FAA said the outage may have been caused by data outage between Long Island and Philadelphia. Another incident involving a radar and communications outage occurred for roughly 90 seconds on May 9.
The company was among the hardest hit by the outages, with United flights accounting for almost 70% of all operations at EWR, according to Reuters. The Trump administration said it would organize an emergency task force to quickly take steps to prevent further telecommunications outages.
U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean P. Duffy announced his and President Donald Trump’s plan to replace the nation’s “outdated” air traffic control system in early May.
On Wednesday, Duffy provided an update on the administration’s work to improve EWR, emphasizing the need to update old systems and noting concerns over other airports. (RELATED: Safety-Impaired DC Airport Takes Time To Throw Party For Gays)
“I’m concerned that we could have more of Newarks. And again, why it’s so important that we actually begin this build with the money that Congress is going to send us,” he said.
This article was originally published at dailycaller.com
