How Safe Is It to Fly Right Now? - Terms of Service with Clare Duffy - Podcast on CNN Audio

CNN

20-05-2025

Clare Duffy
00:00:01
So, I have a flight coming up, and just speaking for myself, it feels like kind of a scary time to fly. In the past few weeks, there have been reports of several radar outages at Newark Airport in New Jersey, where, for brief stretches, air traffic controllers couldn't see or communicate with pilots in the air. This happened even more recently at Denver International Airport. These outages have been traumatic for air traffic controllers. And caused major flight delays and cancelations at Newark. But luckily, it didn't result in any major incidents in the air. Unfortunately, that's not the worst aviation news from this year. Back in January, tragedy struck when a commercial plane collided with a U.S. Army helicopter over the Potomac River. All 67 people on board both aircraft were killed, an incident that's still being investigated. Two other plane crashes, a commercial flight in Toronto that flipped on the runway and a private medivac flight that crashed in Philadelphia also made national news. Amid these frightening headlines, one question is top of mind for me and probably anyone else gearing up for Memorial Day travel. And that is, is it safe to fly right now? To get some clarity, I spoke with CNN aviation and transportation correspondent, Pete Muntean. Pete helped me understand the technology that's powering aviation today. Hopefully this conversation will help you better understand this string of bad news and what's being done to address it. I'm Clare Duffy and this is Terms of Service.
Clare Duffy
00:01:46
Pete, thank you for being here.
Pete Muntean
00:01:48
Anytime, happy to be here.
Clare Duffy
00:01:49
So, before we really get into it, you are not just a reporter when it comes to aviation and transportation. You are also actually a pilot. Tell me about how you got into flying.
Pete Muntean
00:01:59
'I'm really lucky. I grew up around aviation and I have remarkable privilege in that way. Both of my parents were pilots, so I was in small airplanes when I was like two weeks old. And my mom was an air show pilot and an aerobatic pilot. She had a flight school also. Growing up, I announced for her at air shows. We were the only mother-son team, which was very fun.
Clare Duffy
00:02:19
I love it.
00:02:20
My dad had a few aviation businesses. I was very much an only child, and so I got to go with them pretty much everywhere to trade shows and stuff. And so, Kind of grew up in the back of the family airplane. It's called a Piper Lance, which is like a big station wagon single engine airplane and have a ton of fond memories doing that.
Clare Duffy
00:02:38
So I was gonna ask, you're still flying, and I wanted to know like what kind of plane you fly?
Pete Muntean
00:02:43
'Yeah, so I fly, primarily I fly two different airplanes. So I have a airplane called a Super Decathlon, which is a two-seat airplane. You sit one in front of the other. It's an aerobatic airplane. It's sort of just a fun-flying airplane. And then I also fly a Beech Bonanza, which is a six-seater, single-engine airplane. You can go a little faster. You can get a little higher. It's not really a replacement for the airlines, but it offers a lot of utility and flexibility. It's pretty awesome.
Clare Duffy
00:03:09
Okay, so I imagine that the answer to this is like a lot of things, but will you give us an overview of what kinds of technologies are involved in keeping planes in the air and having them navigate safely?
Pete Muntean
00:03:23
'So let's sort of limit it to commercial flying. Air traffic control really sort of keeps airplanes separated, spaced out properly, the spacing can change based on the weather conditions and how much volume, they call it, an airport can handle at any one given time. So air traffic control is really critical to airline flying. It's a huge layer of safety, and when there's a hole in that layer of safety, it's called the swiss cheese model. And so usually if something bad goes wrong, something is able to sort of go through one hole in the swiss cheese, and then maybe not hit another hole at the next layer to keep things safe. So air traffic control is a huge thing. The controllers, though, are worked really hard. Many of them are working mandatory six-day weeks of 10-hour shifts.
Clare Duffy
00:04:10
Wow.
Pete Muntean
00:04:10
There's a shortage of controllers right now, 3,000 controllers short in the U.S. So there's sort of the infrastructure system at air traffic control, and then there's the people layer of the system at Air Traffic Control. And then in airplanes, there are technologies to avoid collisions, that's called TCAS, that traffic collision avoidance system, pretty literal. And it'll tell pilots of a commercial airliner, climb or descend or turn, if there is a collision sort of brewing in front of them. Those are the big two technologies when it comes to keeping planes from hitting one another.
Clare Duffy
00:04:45
Can you describe what happens in an air traffic control center and how air traffic controllers are actually communicating with pilots?
Pete Muntean
00:04:52
Yeah, so I think people have this image of air traffic controllers always being in a control tower where they're looking out the window, you know, they have binoculars or talking on the radio, and they're able to physically see what's going on. That is one version of the facilities that make up the air traffic control system. But then there are other facilities where controllers don't see anything but what's on their radar scope. So there are things called Tricons. Which are called Terminal Radar Approach Control Facilities, and centers. Centers control airplanes primarily up high. TRACONS control airplanes primarily down low, approaching the airspace that would be controlled by a tower and airplanes that have just left that space.
Clare Duffy
00:05:34
So what do those rooms look like?
Pete Muntean
00:05:36
It's usually a dark room. You're usually only able to see what's on the radar scope in front of you. You're responsible for a little sliver of airspace they call a sector. There are not only switch panels to be able to talk on different radio frequencies, but then there's usually a phone that they call the landline to coordinate between other sectors. And then every controller has in front of them something called strips. And that is actually what signifies a physical airplane. And it says the airplane type, where it's going, where it came from, what it's doing. So it's a pretty complicated system. The other big player here is the weather. And so when bad weather strikes, that can really throw existing flight routes and all best laid plans for a loop.
Clare Duffy
00:06:23
How have we seen aviation technology evolve in the last few decades?
Pete Muntean
00:06:29
'I'll tell you just from my experience and then I'll sort of tell you from my reporting. When I was a kid flying around with my parents, now I kind of know sometimes their judgment wasn't so great. They had in this little six-seater we flew around in, something called a Stormscope. It was just a little like probably the size of like the circumference of a coffee cup that was on the instrument panel. And the only piece of information you could get out of that was where lightning strikes were. And that's it. Like, it couldn't tell you where it was raining. It could just tell you there was a lightning strike here and a lightning strike there. So that is like ancient technology now. And, you know, my parents would fly using ground-based radio beacons. That is also essentially ancient technology. Now GPS has come into the fold. I can get weather and actually see where other airplanes are on my phone using a data link. So there have been leaps and bounds technologically in aviation. Commercial airplanes have had that TCAS system for decades. Now we have similar kind of systems in small airplanes, which are pretty, it's pretty amazing, the technological advance. So ADS-B is the biggest technological advance we've seen in aviation. That stands for automatic dependent surveillance broadcast. It's kind of a mouthful. It is a technology trotted out by the FAA, mandated in 2020 for all airplanes operating in the, what they call the National Airspace System, to have this technology. And it shows with more clarity where you are than what a radar would provide. So you've probably seen at least shots of a radar, like in Top Gun...
Clare Duffy
00:08:10
Mhmm that like circular sort of screen...
Pete Muntean
00:08:10
'Or like the big red sweeping thing. Yes, yeah, and it displays on a screen, and usually it's on a tower, and there's a big red sort of dish that rotates around outside, and that provides controllers in a tower or a radar facility where airplanes are. That is incumbent upon how quickly the radar sweeps around. So, there's a lag in what controllers can see on their scopes, the refresh rate for an airplane is like six to tweleve seconds with radar. With ADS-B, this new technology, it's about every second. So it provides controllers a lot more information, granular information, like real time, up to the minute, up to second really. And the other flip side of that is that if you have the proper equipment in your airplane or helicopter, it can show you that information that controllers are seeing also. So it provides not only air traffic control better information, but pilots better information. So it's a huge...
Clare Duffy
00:09:12
Right. So they can communicate better because they know what each of them are looking at.
Pete Muntean
00:09:14
Yeah, you're kind of seeing the same picture. So you're not having to interpolate in your mind's eye and figure out what this controller is talking about. And so it's very, very critical in avoiding collisions. It doesn't really replace what you can see with your eyeball, but it really provides a much better fidelity, much more clearer picture than you would say 20 or 30 years ago.
Clare Duffy
00:09:37
So why is it that in the past few months we have seen so much bad news in the aviation space? You know, the crashes that we've seen, the communication issues at Newark International Airport. Is this year worse than past years? Like what's happening?
Pete Muntean
00:09:53
'Well, the Potomac crash would have been news regardless, because that was the first major air disaster since the Colgan air crash of 2009. That was the last time there were major fatalities in a U.S. Commercial airline flight. So that was really significant. I think we had been paying a lot of attention to the warning signs. And so in 2023, there was a huge uptick in near collisions involving commercial flights at major airports, JFK, Austin, Boston, Burbank, huge airports that didn't typically have this problem. Then they rose to the level of news. And they were incidents, but they didn't turn into accidents. They didn't turn into injuries or fatalities. This year has been pretty remarkable when it comes to aviation because of the Potomac midair collision, because of reforms that will come out of that, because of attention paid to that. The news cycle is so short, but I think people really sat up and thought about, well gee, there are all these warning signs, a shortage of air traffic controllers, there was a brain drain during the pandemic where a lot of old hand pilots ready to retire, retired a bit early. A lot of new people coming into aviation. There's a pilot shortage at the commercial airlines. So a lot things are changing and the Newark issues are sort of a microcosm of all of that too, but on the other end. So that's all about infrastructure, the back-end technology at air traffic control facilities, which is getting very old now, and the shortage of people, the other end of the system. So that is a real microcosm and symptomatic of all of these things that have been going on in the air traffic-control world that can really degrade safety. And so people ask, like, are we just covering this stuff more? I think people do care more. Which in a way drives the coverage, but these are all significant enough that we probably would have been covering it anyway.
Clare Duffy
00:11:55
Right. And what about, like, I mean, we saw the airplane that flipped upside down in Toronto. I think that was this year. This year feels like it's been a million months.
Pete Muntean
00:12:03
Yeah. I know.
Clare Duffy
00:12:03
We saw the plane that crashed in Philadelphia. Like, are those things connected, too, or these are just, like, bad things that all happen to be happening at the same time?
Pete Muntean
00:12:13
'You know, it's a little hard to say, because a lot of those incidents, we have such a small snapshot into what actually went down. And so, you know, you kind of have to wait to see how the investigation pans out in order to sort of, if there's any chance at sort of building a thread between one and the other. I would say that the Philadelphia crash, which was a private jet on a medevac flight, was probably a bit of a one-off. The Toronto crash. There were some environmental conditions there. There was blowing snow across the runway. That makes things pretty challenging. The wind is pretty high. So that's a little different than a commercial flight and a helicopter hitting each other at night in clear weather. Everyone says that was very, very avoidable. And the more we learn about it and the position of the helicopter route there in reference to the approach path that commercial flight American 5342 is taking. That was essentially, everyone says, an accident waiting to happen. An untenable risk to safety is what NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy called it. So sure, there's a little connective tissue, but not the biggest. And I think the Philadelphia crash, we covered more because people were paying attention more just because it was like barely a week after the midair collision over the Potomac.
Clare Duffy
00:13:33
Right.
Pete Muntean
00:13:34
So, you know, I mean, aviation is risky and bad things happen and aviation is always very committed to safety and to try and figure out what went wrong. And in all of those cases, especially the Potomac crash, it's a very granular investigation to really sort of get to the bottom of it.
Clare Duffy
00:13:58
'Coming up, we turn to the more recent radar outages at Newark. How did the technology there fail? And is it cause for long-term alarm? That's after the break.
Clare Duffy
00:14:20
So, on Newark, what is actually happening at the airport that is causing these delays, we're seeing flight restrictions, but in particular, we've seen a number of these incidents where it appears that the air traffic controllers have lost communication with planes that in the air.
Pete Muntean
00:14:37
That's the big thing here. And so we know that the incident where controllers in the approach control facility, which is the dark room facility that I described earlier, where they're just looking at the radar scope, and so they can only see airplanes via the scope and communicate with them via radio, they lost radar and radio for 90 seconds back on April 28th. Which a controller will tell you that's an eternity.
Clare Duffy
00:15:07
Mhmm.
Pete Muntean
00:15:07
Because things are happening so fast, these airplanes are moving at hundreds of miles an hour, covering a lot of ground every second. And so for controllers to not be able to see where airplanes were or communicate with them via voice is really problematic. And I talked to one controller in the TRACON there who said, he was there at the time of the incident, he says it's possibly the worst thing that can happen to you as a controller. The issue is now we're finding out that this happened a few times before that incident that really sort of brought this to light, and this also has happened a couple times after that incident. So there's four or five cases where controllers at the Newark Approach Control Facility lost radar and radio for 30 to 90 seconds in the last year. There was one in October, one in November, this one in April, and then essentially a couple of rapid fire one last Friday and then one the Sunday after. The FAA says it's installed this backup line and what is at the center of this issue is the infrastructure, an old copper wire, they say, that essentially runs this facility, which last July, moved to Philadelphia from Long Island. And so they're essentially running this new facility off of the old facility. Someone described it to our René Marsh as like running it like off an extension cord.
Clare Duffy
00:16:27
That sounds horrible.
Pete Muntean
00:16:27
I know. So this old copper wire essentially carries the radar data and the voice communications. And so when that goes down, and the backup doesn't kick in, it's essentially a blackout, meaning there's no controllers. Controllers cannot communicate and cannot see you. So that's a huge problem. It really all goes back to this move that the FAA did and the shortage of controllers. The FAA wanted to entice more controllers to work in this Newark sector of airspace and so instead of having them move to Long Island they thought well maybe we'll do it in out of Philadelphia and so they institute this move last July to try and sort of bolster their numbers but by moving this facility it introduced new problems.
Clare Duffy
00:17:15
And is there not a world where they just say, do we just move back so we're not in this extension cord system?
Pete Muntean
00:17:20
'I don't think they'll move back. I feel like that would be almost admitting defeat. The FAA insists that they have controllers in the pipeline, they've got trainees working there, doing on-the-job training right now, and that they've fixed the system. They have done an upgrade patch on the radars, and they've replaced the line, or they're replacing the line with a backup also. So they feel like they've built in some redundancy, which is so key in aviation. And so I don't think they'll move back. But a lot of people are watching, including me. In November, there was a failure. On November 6th, it was an overnight, and the controllers were trying to turn, they were talking to a FedEx flight, giving them vectors, turning them onto the final approach path into Newark when they had one of these blackouts. And so instead of this FedEx flight that they were communicating with making this critical turn, the FedEx flight just kept zooming east and into the busy airspace over LaGuardia...
Clare Duffy
00:18:24
Oh...
Pete Muntean
00:18:24
'And this one controller who I spoke with told me it's a by the grace of God he said it was a miracle that there was not a mid-air collision.
Clare Duffy
00:18:32
Wow.
Pete Muntean
00:18:32
Because that was really dangerous. Now there are systems in place there are procedures in place that pilots and controllers follow when they lose communication and we're going to get a bit more of a glimpse into that you know the Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby, they've both told me there's no major safety risk here, but lay that against what the controllers are saying that this could have been really bad.
Clare Duffy
00:19:00
'Well, yeah, and you've reported that five air traffic controllers at Newark took a 45-day trauma leave after that April 28th communication incident. And I mean, I can understand why that would be so stressful if you think there's a possibility that a collision could have occurred on your watch because of that.
Pete Muntean
00:19:17
Yeah, I mean they say it's the worst possible thing that can happen to them I can't imagine what that would be like. I've never been an air traffic controller although I've worked in the simulators for stories and it was hard and you really have to have in your mind's eye a knowledge of where things are and where airplanes are going things change really quickly and it's not easy.
Clare Duffy
00:19:37
Is this something that might be happening at other airports and we just don't know about it yet? Or is this something that is sort of like this unique confluence of issues that Newark is dealing with right now?
Pete Muntean
00:19:48
Newark is a unique situation. The staffing, trauma leave, and the infrastructure issues leading to these failures, that is a real perfect storm. But we know that those issues separately occur at different places all the time. There's a shortage of controllers nationwide. We know that. We know the air traffic control infrastructure is old. And there will be times when frequencies go down, so controllers can't communicate with pilots and so Newark is special but in a way not special. It's just kind of the intersection of all these bad things at once.
Clare Duffy
00:20:27
So I hate to tell you that none of this is making me feel very good.
Pete Muntean
00:20:30
Sorry. I hate to be that guy, you know, I like I clearly I love and and derive a lot of joy out of aviation I don't want to make people afraid. And the good news here is that Aviation has so many layers of safety There are so many safety nets built in that when one goes down, usually the other can pick up some slack. But it's not a good thing that these things keep happening. It's why we cover them and it's why we hold the powerful to account and question what the heck is going on here?
Clare Duffy
00:21:03
As Pete and I were talking, news was breaking that air traffic controllers at Denver's airport experienced a similar communications outage last Monday.
Clare Duffy
00:21:15
So is it safe to be flying right now?
Pete Muntean
00:21:18
'I'd say generally it's very safe and I think that incidents make pilots and controllers and flight attendants and the professionals in aviation, essentially the first responders in aviation more vigilant. And I think everyone has their guard up in a big way, especially after the mid-air collision and also on the controller side too. I think people now, you know, recent incidents sort of make it top of mind so that aviation in general is sort of training for the next thing. In a way, you have to be a little reactionary and know what could go wrong and know that the most recent thing probably won't happen again because it just happened.
Clare Duffy
00:22:06
Like, we learn from each thing that's happened.
Pete Muntean
00:22:09
Yeah, generally. Incidents are a great teacher and failure is a great teacher, sadly.
Clare Duffy
00:22:14
What does the government plan to do to address these issues?
Pete Muntean
00:22:19
The big thing right now is that they're looking at trying to incentivize people to come into the controller workforce, giving them different essentially financial incentives when they reach certain benchmarks and scrambling to hire more people. And so the FAA under this administration and previous administrations have been trying to figure that out. It's not easy. And they're trying to hunt for ducks now where there are ducks. So sometimes they looked at people like gamers...
Clare Duffy
00:22:50
Hmm, that makes sense.
Pete Muntean
00:22:50
Who were really good at sort of like working a map and situations and moving things around and so that is a talent pool that may be undertapped and trying to make it so that people can earn a good living wage and live in a good place. So there are a lot of factors at play here people is the big one.
Clare Duffy
00:23:11
Do we have a sense of how long it is going to take for us to be in a better place, and in the meantime, do we just kind of have to accept that the risk might be slightly higher?
Pete Muntean
00:23:21
Um, the Trump administration says in there, they have trotted out this plan to redo the infrastructure at the FAA and at air traffic control facilities across the country. They say that will take two or three years. I've been publicly kind of skeptical about that because, um, to do a big build, they, you know, one of the things they call for is building six new air traffic controls centers, super centers, they call them, which I think two to three years, you may lucky to break ground. So it seems like, you know, they could dig their way out of the people shortage in a few years, but the stats aren't very rosy because if they're netting only a few dozen people a year and you're 3000 short, then you're talking about decades to fill the void.
Clare Duffy
00:24:12
What about the airlines themselves? Is there anything that they can do to help improve safety? Or is it really incumbent on the government to address this issue?
Pete Muntean
00:24:20
The airlines are actually calling on the government to address it and United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby has been particularly hard on the FAA for years saying that they need to fix the shortage of controllers, they need the fix the infrastructure and he's been very hard on them about Newark because that's a huge hub for United Airlines for transcontinental and transatlantic flights and beyond. So, he says that the way to fix the system is for the FAA to limit the number of flights into Newark, something they call slot rules, and making it so that if United scales down its flights when there's a huge meltdown like this at Newark that other airlines don't swoop in and fill the void and then make it too crowded, overcrowded. And so right now, the airlines and the FIA are meeting to essentially sort of put a new cap on that. The big thing is for airlines to sort of be realistic. There's a huge boom in travel, they want to fill every seat, there's a big corporate need for shareholder value and to make it so that they're making money and there's a lot of revenue, but they have to be realistic.
Clare Duffy
00:25:32
I'm curious, for everyday travelers, are there certain airports or airlines that are going to be better or safer? Like, is there anything as individuals that we can do to try to keep ourselves safer?
Pete Muntean
00:25:45
I will give you the tips that I give everybody. This is not necessarily a safety thing, but more a convenience thing, which is book the first flight out of the day. You have a much higher chance, statistically, of getting there on time. Try to book flights that are nonstop, connecting sort of builds in more unknowns into a trip. Sometimes that's hard, and sometimes that's way more expensive. And really just have a lot of patience for it because, you know, it wasn't all that long ago that the Wright brothers invented this. We're talking like 122 years ago. So it's pretty miraculous that the airlines do this with such reliability. I'd say wear your seatbelt. That's the big safety thing. Some people get really lax about that. And we see people, the top cause of injuries on commercial flights is turbulence. And I'm always on with my seatbelt and it's tight.
Clare Duffy
00:26:37
Well, Pete, thank you so much for doing this. Really appreciate it.
Pete Muntean
00:26:44
Anytime.
Clare Duffy
00:26:44
Okay, so I can't say I feel totally reassured after that conversation, but I do feel more informed, and yes, overall, pretty safe. To recap, here are some things to keep in mind if you're gearing up for summer travel: First, the technology that helps air traffic controllers and pilots understand where planes are in the sky has gotten a lot more advanced and precise in the past few decades. Experts still say based on the data, you're safer flying than you are driving in your car to the airport. Next, incidents like the recent radar outages at Newark are undeniably scary, but they're also prompting the FAA to take a closer look at this infrastructure. It's hard to say how quickly the government will act to improve these systems, but as Pete said, the aviation industry tends to learn from past failures. And, finally, If you have a flight booked, it's probably not worth canceling it. But for future travel, consider booking flights early in the day to avoid delays. That's it for this week's episode of Terms of Service. I'm Clare Duffy, talk to you next week.
Clare Duffy
00:27:59
Terms of Service is a CNN Audio and Goat Rodeo production. This show is produced and hosted by me, Clare Duffy. At Goat Rodeo, the lead producer is Rebecca Seidel, and the executive producers are Megan Nadolski and Ian Enright. At CNN, Matt Martinez is our senior producer and Dan Dzula is our technical director. Haley Thomas is senior producer of development. Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. With support from Kyra Dahring, Emily Williams, Tayler Phillips, David Rind, Dan Bloom, Robert Mathers, Jamus Andrest, Nicole Pesaru, Alex Manasseri, Mark Duffy, Leni Steinhardt, Jon Dianora and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Katie Hinman, David Goldman, and Wendy Brundige. Thank you for listening.