FAA says air traffic controllers in Florida briefly lost radar Friday after fiber line was cut

Air traffic controllers in Florida briefly lost their radar Friday after a fiber optic line was cut, but the outage didn’t lead to disruptions like what happened after similar outages around the Newark, New Jersey, airport this spring.

Controllers were able to continue directing planes across five states in the Southeast because a backup system kicked in immediately as designed. The Federal Aviation Administration said no flights were disrupted.

The FAA said the radar center in Jacksonville, Florida, continued operating but on alert status because its primary communication line went down. A contractor was working on repairing the severed fiber line Friday afternoon. Authorities didn’t specify what caused the severed line or where it happened.

The FAA said the outage was momentary, but when air traffic controllers in a different facility in Philadelphia lost radar twice this spring it took 90 seconds for their systems to reboot after the system went down. In that case, the backup system didn’t work immediately. Those outages led to major disruptions at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey because five controllers went on trauma leave afterward, and that facility in Philadelphia directs planes in and out of the airport.

Hundreds of flights had to be canceled in Newark because the remaining controllers couldn’t safely handle every flight on the schedule. Operations at the airport have since improved significantly

An FAA spokesperson said there was “no loss of critical air traffic service” in Jacksonville because the backup system kicked in. That center is responsible for planes flying across roughly 160,000 square miles (414,000 square kilometers) of airspace across most of Alabama, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina and South Carolina.

The problems in Newark were blamed on the failure of aging copper wires that much of the nation’s air traffic control system still relies on. Transportation officials said the Newark problems demonstrated the need for a multimillion-dollar overhaul of the system that they are lobbying Congress to approve.