Colorado Air Traffic Control Facility Lost Contact With Some Pilots

A second air traffic control facility in the United States experienced a 90-second communications outage this week after a series of disruptions raised safety fears and caused long flight delays at Newark Liberty International Airport near New York.

Part of an air traffic control facility in Colorado that coordinates flights over a large swath of the West had a partial outage on Monday, the Federal Aviation Administration said on Thursday. The outage occurred after another air traffic facility in Philadelphia had two radar outages in recent weeks that left controllers unable to communicate with planes headed to or from Newark Liberty International Airport, a major international hub.

The Colorado outage occurred around 1:50 p.m. when a pair of transmitters that cover a portion of the airspace went down. Unlike their peers in the Newark outage, the controllers in Colorado lost touch only with some pilots and were able to re-establish communications.

“Controllers used another frequency to relay instructions to pilots,” the aviation agency said. “Aircraft remained safely separated, and there were no impacts to operations. The F.A.A. is investigating.”

The two air traffic facilities serve different functions. The Philadelphia facility mainly guides planes landing at or taking off from Newark while the facility in Colorado oversees planes during their journeys. The aircraft are typically higher in the sky, spaced farther apart and moving at steady speeds. There are about two dozen such facilities nationwide, each covering more than 100,000 square miles of airspace.

The outage was reported earlier by the ABC affiliate Denver7. Citing unnamed sources, the station reported that almost two dozen pilots headed to Denver International Airport were unable to contact air traffic control for six minutes on Monday afternoon.