I’ve never liked Newark Liberty International Airport, and it’s even lower on my list of airports today.
“Yet another equipment outage at Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR) caused widespread delays and a ground stop over the weekend,” writes Naveen Dhaliwal at CBS News this morning. “The Federal Aviation Administration said the third outage in less than two weeks [emphasis mine] happened Sunday morning after a backup air traffic control system momentarily failed.”
What’s behind these system failures?
The main culprit is the severely outdated IT systems used by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
“Our system is 25-30 years old. We use copper wires. Floppy disks,” said Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on Fox News in March 2025. “It’s atrocious, the system we use. It’s safe, but we’re seeing the cracks of age.”
Duffy was actually being kind. The systems are actually much older and more broken.
As the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported in March 2025, of the 138 air traffic control (ATC) systems evaluated, “51 (37 percent) were deemed unsustainable by the FAA and 54 (39 percent) were potentially unsustainable. Many unsustainable and potentially unsustainable systems have critical operational impacts on the safety and efficiency of the national airspace.”
In testimony to Congress, Heather Krause, the GAO’s managing director of physical infrastructure, said “six of the ATC systems date back over 60 years, and 40 of them are three decades old, while 72 have been in operation for over 20 years,” as reported by Deborah O’Donoghue in Travel Tomorrow. “Their age leads to difficulties in finding both spare parts and personnel who know how to maintain and fix them, creating ‘risks to the FAA’s ability to ensure the safe, orderly, and expeditious flow of air traffic,’ Krause said.”
If you think this level of technical debt is just a government problem, think again.
Back in January 2023, we asked members of our Indago supply chain research community — who are all supply chain and logistics professionals from manufacturing, retail, and distribution companies — “How much technical debt exists in your supply chain operations?”
33% of the respondents reported having “High” or “Very High” technical debt. We also asked our members, “Is reducing technical debt in your supply chain operations — that is, investing to implement new software applications or to upgrade existing systems — a priority at your company this year?” More than half the respondents (52%) said that reducing technical debt in their supply chain operations was either a “Very High” (22%) or “High” (30%) priority that year.
“I believe [our CEO and other senior executives] do not understand how much technical debt exists as we continually rely on legacy systems to perform [our daily] work,” said one Indago supply chain executive. “On top of the technical debt, we have an overreliance on Excel.”
The supply chain disruptions caused by the Covid pandemic, and the inability of many companies to respond to them effectively due to outdated systems, was a wakeup call. Unfortunately, instead of taking action, some companies just hit the snooze button again.
Are you still running your supply chain on floppy disks? Or the same way you were back in 1999 or even 2019?
What’s happening at Newark Liberty International Airport and with air traffic control systems is another wakeup call to address your technical debt problem. The longer you ignore the problem, the more costly, risky, and time-consuming it will be to fix.
For related commentary, please read “When You Manage Your Supply Chain Like It’s 1999 (Lessons From The IRS)” and “How Much Technical Debt Exists In Your Supply Chain Operations?”
