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The Newark airport crisis
A shortage of air traffic controllers, bungled IT management, outdated technology, and a brewing disaster in our airspace.
The strangest thing of all is that the FAA appears to have brought the problem on itself — thanks in part to endemic government issues such as underfunding and bureaucracy, but also to the agency’s track record of bad risk management when it comes to modern technology. And in February, at the direction of Elon Musk’s DOGE, the FAA laid off more than 100 workers, including the maintenance technicians and telecommunications specialists needed to keep unreliable systems in working order. According to an internal study obtained by CNN, experts calculated that the risk of a critical failure for Newark’s remote feeds were one in 11 million, or a roughly “seven-nines” reliability standard that allowed only three seconds of downtime in a given year.
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