United Airlines will cut nearly three dozen round-trip flights from its daily schedule in and out of Newark Liberty International Airport starting this weekend, its top executive announced on Friday.
The reason, CEO Scott Kirby said in a statement, was Newark’s continuing air traffic control staffing issue, as well as the technological problems that snarled airport operations this week.
“It’s disappointing to make further cuts to an already reduced schedule at Newark, but since there is no way to resolve the near-term structural FAA staffing issues, we feel like there is no other choice in order to protect our customers,” Kirby said.
United is Newark Airport‘s largest carrier. Cutting 35 flights means slashing about 10% of its daily agenda at the airport, where the airline flies an average of 328 flights a day.
A spokesperson for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which manages New Jersey’s airports, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Even for an airport that has long been the butt of the joke for fed-up travelers and late-night hosts alike, Newark has had a week for the history books.
It began Monday with an equipment and telecommunications outage at the airport’s troubled air traffic control center in Philadelphia.
The Federal Aviation Administration issued a two-hour ground stop, causing hundreds of flights around the country to be canceled or delayed.
The outage was fixed by Monday afternoon.
But Kirby said the problem “compounded” as 20% of air traffic controllers walked off the job later in the week.
A spokesperson for the union representing air traffic controllers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Keep in mind, this particular air traffic control facility has been chronically understaffed for years and without these controllers, it’s now clear — and the FAA tells us — that Newark airport cannot handle the number of planes that are scheduled to operate there in the weeks and months ahead,” the CEO added.
The FAA did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the nature of the staffing issues or a timeline on delays.
The airport’s woes stretched into Saturday morning, with the FAA still predicting travelers would be delayed for an average of one hour and 53 minutes coming into Newark.
Ahead of a busy summer travel season, Newark Airport is also rushing to finish construction on a runway that has been fully closed since April.
On Wednesday, the airport said on X that the runway would not reopen until mid-June.
Stories by AJ McDougall
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AJ McDougall may be reached at amcdougall@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on X at @oldmcdougall.