Phoenix Sky Harbor travelers got the familiar modern-air-travel experience Monday: the airport was still standing, but the schedule was not. Cancellations and lengthy delays piled up as an air traffic control outage in the Northeast rippled into Phoenix.
By 1:30 p.m., more than 170 flights into or out of Sky Harbor were delayed, according to FlightAware. Seven American Airlines and United Airlines flights to Newark were canceled. Among the longer waits, two American flights tied to Philadelphia and another to Newark were delayed more than five hours. Three other flights linked to New York’s Kennedy Airport were also delayed.
The disruption started far from Arizona. The outage affected operations at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, Kennedy and LaGuardia airports in New York, and Philadelphia International Airport. The Associated Press reported that a primary communications circuit failed Monday morning at a Federal Aviation Administration facility in Philadelphia, and a backup fiber-optic line had also been cut during construction. That is the sort of infrastructure detail that sounds minor right up until it starts rearranging everyone’s day.
It was not immediately clear how many of Phoenix’s disruptions were tied directly to the outage, which is a polite way of saying the airport’s departure board was doing its own version of interpretive dance. Some flights at the affected Northeast airports resumed by early afternoon, but significant delays were expected through the day.
For passengers, the practical advice was simple enough: check flight status before heading out. For everyone else, Monday was another reminder that air travel can be held hostage by a problem hundreds or thousands of miles away, and the airport will still expect you to act surprised.
As the delays stretched on, Sky Harbor became part of a much bigger mess with a very small lesson: when the system hiccups in one place, the inconvenience gets a connecting flight.
