Denver Airport Lost Air Traffic Control for 90 Seconds

In what is becoming an all too familiar scenario over the past month, Denver International Airport lost all communications for nearly 90 seconds earlier this week, Denver7 reported.

As many as 20 pilots flying into the airport Monday afternoon were unable to communicate with air traffic controllers for a minute and half, the Federal Aviation Administration confirmed.

"Part of the Denver Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC) experienced a loss of communications for approximately 90 seconds around 1:50 p.m. local time on Monday, May 12, when both transmitters that cover a segment of airspace went down," according to the FAA.

"Controllers used another frequency to relay instructions to pilots. Aircraft remained safely separated and there were no impacts to operations."

The outage at Denver International Airport affected communications, not radar, the FAA's head of air traffic control, Frank McIntosh, said during a House hearing Thursday. This communications failure follows two high-profile outages of radar and communications in the past 2 1/2 weeks at a facility that directs planes in and out of the Newark, New Jersey, airport.

McIntosh said both the primary and main backup frequencies went down, so the controllers had to turn to an emergency frequency to communicate.

David Riley, a retired air traffic controller with 32 years of experience, including 15 years in Denver, told Denver7, "The equipment is getting old. It's one thing to lose track of one airplane because you can't communicate with them, but to lose track of all of the airplanes that you had communication with.

"And from my understanding, in this situation they still had radar coverage, but that's like watching a car crash happen and not be able to do anything about it."

The Newark airport has generally led the nation in flight cancellations and delays ever since its first radar outage on April 28 that also lasted about 90 seconds. A second outage happened on May 9. In both those instances controllers lost both radar and communications.

In a Thursday opinion piece published by Newsweek, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy detailed the steps he and President Donald Trump plan to take to improve the infrastructure and technology at the nation's airports.

"When I became secretary and started looking under the hood, I was shocked to find 1960s technology throughout our air traffic system — floppy disks, copper wires, and ancient radar designed for propeller planes. The equipment looks like it came out of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum," he wrote.

Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.