Newark Airport radar and radio telecommunications outages
Air traffic controllers responsible for Newark Liberty International Airport's airspace lost radar and radio contact with aircraft for roughly 90 seconds on at least three separate occasions in a two-week span, leading to a controller walkout, weeks of flight delays and cancellations, and a Congressional response.
The damage was public. The root cause was preventable.
Air traffic controllers responsible for Newark Liberty International Airport's airspace lost radar and radio contact with aircraft for roughly 90 seconds on at least three separate occasions in a two-week span, leading to a controller walkout, weeks of flight delays and cancellations, and a Congressional response.
What the software actually got wrong
The radar data for Newark's airspace is generated by the FAA's STARS system in New York and fed to controllers at the Philadelphia TRACON over telecommunications lines with no automatic backup; the FAA said the repeated outages stemmed from aging copper telecom connections and a lack of redundancy in that data feed, and it is adding backup connections, converting to fiber, and building a local STARS hub at Philadelphia so the facility no longer depends on a single remote link.
The radar data for Newark's airspace is generated by...
The radar data for Newark's airspace is generated by the FAA's STARS system in New York and fed to controllers at the Philadelphia TRACON over telecommunications lines with no automatic backup
Requs AI Edge Case flags this exact pattern at the requirements and architecture stage — before a single line of code implementing it exists — so the assumption behind it gets challenged while it is still cheap to fix.
The FAA said the repeated outages stemmed from aging...
the FAA said the repeated outages stemmed from aging copper telecom connections and a lack of redundancy in that data feed
Requs AI Software FMEA traces this failure mode back to the system-level hazard it feeds, tagging it against the Common Defect Enumeration so it surfaces in review instead of in the field.
It is adding backup connections, converting to fiber
it is adding backup connections, converting to fiber
Requs AI Edge Case and Software FMEA together treat this as a known, catalogued defect pattern — not a novel surprise — so it gets tested for deliberately rather than discovered after deployment.
Beyond code coverage and "shall" testing
Root causes like this one rarely show up in code coverage or requirements-compliance testing, because nobody wrote a requirement anticipating the specific edge case that broke. Requs AI Edge Case and Requs AI Software FMEA are built to surface exactly this class of overlooked failure mode — before the software is written.
Surfaces this before code exists
Identifies edge cases like this one at requirements and architecture time, using the Common Defect Enumeration to catalog failure patterns seen across hundreds of real-world software failures — including this one.
Connects the failure mode to the hazard
Traces this class of root cause directly to the system-level hazard it can produce, so a defect pattern like this one gets flagged during design review instead of after it ships.
Find the overlooked root causes before they ship.
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