May 21, 2025. Woe is Newark.

When was the last time you heard anything good about Newark airport? Deservedly or not, it’s always been the butt of jokes and a synonym for all of the things unpleasant about commercial flying.

It hasn’t gotten better of late. If you’ve been tuned to the news at all, you’re aware that EWR is being forced to cut hundreds of flights due to air traffic control breakdowns. The airport has been plagued with delays and cancellations the last few weeks, including an ATC outage that left dozens of planes in communications limbo for several seconds.

This is huge hit for United Airlines, by far Newark’s biggest operator.

Two wake-up calls here. The first, clearly, is that our air traffic control infrastructure needs to be upgraded ASAP. We need better technology and more controllers. While this has been the case for years, situations like the one at Newark are giving the issue sudden traction.

Maybe, too, this will inspire airlines to rethink their scheduling and fleet strategies. This is something I’ve griped about many times: over the last two or three decades, air traffic has fragmented. More people are flying than ever before, but they’re doing so in smaller planes making more departures. Frequency of flights is one of the big ways airlines compete, but the result is too many planes jammed into a system that can’t handle them. This is especially true in the Northeast, where airports like La Guardia and Washington-National are overrun with regional jets.

A smarter strategy would be consolidating flights using bigger planes. And maybe it’s time for Airbus or Boeing to consider the concept of a short-haul domestic widebody — something like the Airbus A300 of old.

Photo courtesy of Unsplash.