Pilots flying near Denver International Airport lost communication with air traffic control for almost two minutes on Monday because of equipment failures. It is the most recent in a series of problems plaguing the country’s aviation infrastructure that have sparked widespread concern.
The Denver Air Route Traffic Control Center lost communication with pilots for about 90 seconds at 1:50 p.m. when transmitters that cover a segment of airspace went down, the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement Thursday.
The center, in Longmont, is one of 22 across the United States and covers 285,000 miles of airspace over nine states, including portions of Wyoming, Kansas, Utah, Nebraska, New Mexico, South Dakota and Arizona.
When the transmitters went down, air traffic controllers used another frequency to communicate instructions to pilots, FAA officials said.
“Aircraft remained safely separated and there were no impacts to operations,” the agency said. “The FAA is investigating.”
The outage impacted a primary and main backup frequency but not radar operations, FAA’s head of air traffic control Frank McIntosh said during a U.S. House of Representatives hearing Thursday.
Denver7 first reported the communication failure on Wednesday.
DIA officials referred questions about the outage to the FAA. United Airlines, which operates a major hub at the airport, was not impacted by the outage, a spokesperson said Thursday.
The outage occurred as the FAA is under increased scrutiny following recent plane crashes and other mishaps, including a deadly midair collision between a passenger jet and an Army helicopter in January that killed 67 people in Washington, D.C.
In recent weeks, a Philadelphia facility that directs planes in and out of Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey reported two radar and communication failures.
The Philadelphia and Denver facilities serve different functions, according to the New York Times. While the Philadelphia center mainly guides aircraft that are taking off and landing, Longmont’s air traffic control center oversees planes in the air — usually higher in the sky, farther apart and moving at steady speeds.
FAA officials have said the problems are caused in part by staff shortages and aging equipment. Last week, President Donald Trump’s administration announced a multibillion-dollar plan to overhaul the country’s air traffic control system, including replacing equipment that relies on floppy disks and replacement parts from eBay. The administration also fired hundreds of FAA employees in April, including radar, landing and navigational aid maintenance workers.
While aviation equipment and transmitters sometimes fail, the scenario that played out Monday in Longmont is not typical, said Chad Kendall, an aviation expert and associate professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver.
Pilots are extensively trained on what to do when there are communication failures, Kendall said, but the outages in Colorado and Newark, along with other issues, mean it’s time to look at facilities, equipment and technology under a microscope.
“The discussion of aging technology has been around for a long time, and we’ve been putting Band-Aids on holes in the system,” Kendall said. “It’s now time to take a more direct and calculated and robust response to fix these problems and update the national airspace system.”
And while news of aviation problems may make travelers nervous, Kendall said the system as a whole is still safe.
“… we still have the best national airspace system in the world and pilots are well trained to handle this,” he said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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