Air-traffic controller says he averted midair collision near Newark

An air-traffic controller says he averted a midair collision near Newark, New Jersey, this month.

Jonathan Stewart, an air-traffic controller and supervisor at the Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) facility in Philadelphia, told The Wall Street Journal on Monday that he prevented the collision in early May between a business jet that had departed the Morristown airport in New Jersey and another small plane that had taken off from nearby Teterboro.

Stewart said the planes headed toward each other at the same altitude and instructed the pilots to turn the planes away from each other, which they did.

Following the incident, Stewart emailed Federal Aviation Administration managers, criticizing their leadership.

“I take my job very seriously, as I do the safety of the flying public, and take pride in my performance,” he wrote.

Stewart took stress-related trauma leave because of the incident and his frustration with the current work situation, as the FAA has struggled to keep critical technology running and fully staff air-traffic facilities.

“I don’t want to be responsible for killing 400 people,” Stewart told the Journal.

In an internal safety report following the close call, Stewart wrote, “The situation is, has been and continues to be unsafe.” He later added, “The amount of stress we are under is insurmountable.”

After talking to senior FAA officials, Stewart said, “For the first time that I’m aware of, they are throwing money at the problem.”

It's unclear whether the agency has definitively acknowledged such an incident, as described by Stewart, occurred.

Since late April, multiple outages at Newark Liberty International Airport have delayed hundreds of flights and interrupted the flow of air traffic.

On April 28, Newark air-traffic controllers experienced radar and communications systems outages, which disabled radar screens and severed radio contact with aircraft for about one minute. The interruption was caused by a major outage at TRACON, which manages the airspace for Newark Airport. 

A similar incident occurred again on May 9, again disconnecting controllers from pilots for a brief period. A third failure happened on Sunday, but was mitigated because a backup system worked, keeping the radar online.