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Continuing Newark Liberty International Airport's current reputation as the hot mess express, the beleaguered transit hub—which has experienced everything from radar blackouts to flight delays to staffing shortages in the last few weeks—will be drastically scaling back flights in and out of EWR through late October, per an interim order set by the Federal Aviation Administration on Tuesday.
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That's a major timeline increase from the "next several weeks" of flight cuts that U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced earlier this month. The FAA's new order will reduce the number of arrivals and departures to 28 per hour each during weekday construction periods through June 15 and on Saturdays through December 31. Outside of that period, the FAA is capping both arrivals and departure rates at 34 flight per hour until October 25. "The FAA determines that this operation target would reduce overscheduling, flight delays, and cancellations to an acceptable level at EWR," reads the interim order.
Overall, the issuing "is intended to relieve the substantial inconvenience to the traveling public caused by excessive flight delays at the airport due to construction, staffing challenges, and recent equipment issues, which magnify as they spread through the National Airspace System."
The new, temporary restrictions on flights in and out of Newark—which were reportedly relayed to major airlines last week, including American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, JetBlue Airways, Spirit Airlines and United Airlines, the latter of which operates nearly 70-percent of the airport's flights—took effect yesterday, May 20. “Reducing the number of flights scheduled at Newark will help ensure that we can safely and reliably operate the flights that remain on the schedule, which is why we proactively reduced our schedule earlier this month,” United Airlines said in statement, per The New York Times.
It remains to be seen if additional flight cuts will be required going forward at Newark—and Time Out will obviously keep you posted if that's the case—but one thing's for sure: we'd seriously rethink flying out of EWR this summer if we were you.