United Airlines Cancels Flights at Newark, The Sky Is Just Too Complicated

Well, folks, air travel in America has once again achieved a new level of chaos — this time at the illustrious disaster zone otherwise known as Newark Liberty International Airport. United Airlines just announced it’s cancelling 35 daily round-trip flights, not because of weather, terrorism, or angry geese, but because air traffic controllers walked off the job after their equipment broke. Again.

Yes, the radar and radios failed, and the people in charge of keeping airplanes from colliding midair understandably said, “You know what? No.” Some apparently took trauma leave, which, if you’ve seen the inside of a Newark control tower during peak hours, honestly sounds like the most sensible decision anyone’s made in aviation this year.

United CEO Scott Kirby — a man whose job is to sell optimism while strapped to a flaming jet engine of logistics failure — issued a grave statement on United’s website that basically read: “This airport is a joke, and we can’t keep pretending it’s not.”

“Newark airport cannot handle the number of planes scheduled to operate there,” he lamented, as if that’s a shocking new development and not a known fact to literally every single passenger who’s ever attempted to leave New Jersey by air.

Let’s recap: the tech broke, controllers bailed, flights were diverted, delays stacked up, thousands of passengers were stranded, and the FAA is standing around like it just dropped its flashlight in a cave.

Meanwhile, the FAA, in its trademark leadership style of “oops, guess we’ll slow things down until it’s someone else’s problem,” has occasionally restricted traffic to Newark while continuing to pretend there’s no staffing crisis. A rep for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association — that’s the union representing these overworked, under-equipped sky shepherds — declined to comment, probably because they’re too busy panic-refreshing Indeed.com.

And what’s United’s big fix? They want the government to reclassify Newark as a Level 3 slot-controlled airport, which is a fancy way of saying: “Can someone please stop us from scheduling 300 flights a day through a glorified parking lot with radios from 1997?”

Let’s be clear: United already operates a mind-numbing 328 flights a day from Newark, which was somehow the 14th-busiest airport in the country last year — though definitely #1 in existential despair per square foot.

This debacle comes just as United plans to add five new international flights from the very same mess of a hub — which is like putting more clowns in a flaming circus tent and hoping no one notices.

But fear not: Kirby says he had a nice chat with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and they’re all very confident that the Trump administration’s plan to invest in FAA tech and infrastructure will solve this — which is adorable, because you’d think maybe reliable radar would’ve been a priority sometime between Twitter rants and flag-hugging photo ops.

Also worth noting: these cuts happen to coincide with United realizing that maybe, just maybe, air travel demand is tanking, and that the words “possible recession” might finally be catching up to the stock price fairy tale.

So there you have it. Planes are grounded. Towers are empty. Controllers are out. And the nation’s skies are once again a tragicomic opera of incompetence, corporate greed, and broken radios. Other than that, everything is fine.