A FOURTH bone-chilling outage has been reported at the Newark International Airport, leading officials to urgently slash the number of flights to avoid congestion.

Federal transportation leaders are demanding immediate changes at the New Jersey airport as the flight nightmare continues.

The Federal Aviation Administration will share a revised schedule, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told CNBC.

Duffy told the outlet that flyers will “see reductions.”

Newark airport currently has about 1200 daily flight arrivals and departures, according to the Port Authority of New Jersey.

The exact number of flights affected has not been announced yet, but the FAA said it held one-on-one meetings with major airlines “to find a balance between reducing their operations at the airport and meeting the needs of each individual airline.”

The Newark airport is also experiencing delays due to construction that is scheduled to end on June 15.

In an attempt to lessen the load of the controllers and cooperate with the construction on one of the runways, the FAA proposed an arrival rate of 28 aircrafts an hour.

“The goal is to have a manageable number of flights land at Newark,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy explained at a press briefing.

“Families shouldn’t have to wait four or five hours for a flight that never takes off.

“By lowering the number of flights, we can ensure the ones that are kept, they do actually take off and they do actually land.”

Once construction ends, the flights arrival rates are proposed to be increased to 34 flights per hour through October 25.

FLIGHT FRIGHT

The discussions come as the FAA investigates a fourth outage at Newark Liberty International Airport in the past three weeks.

The brief outage, which happened at the Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach Control center, did not affect any operations, according to the agency.

The Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach Control center is responsible for managing air traffic control in the airspace around Newark, NJ.com reported.

“Operations are normal after Philadelphia TRACON Area C lost radio frequencies for approximately two seconds around 11:35 a.m,” an FAA spokesman said on Tuesday.

“All aircraft remained safely separated.”

Just three weeks prior, on April 28, the TRACON facility lost total connection for 90 seconds.

During the minute-and-a-half time span, controllers could not see or communicate with the aircrafts.

Newark’s ongoing issues have been attributed to the major staffing cuts at the control center.

Last year, the airport moved the TRACON facility from Westbury, NY, to Philadelphia, PA, hoping to ramp up staffing.

Instead, some controllers living in Westbury left rather than relocate.

The move from Westbury to Philadelphia also caused issues with information transfers, as there was no data backup system in place.

Duffy said that they are making “fast-track fixes” to help improve communication with the airport.

The fixes include new software patches and fiber optic data lines.

“The goal is to have this done as soon as possible,” he said.

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said earlier in May that the airport “cannot handle the number of planes that are scheduled to operate there in the weeks and months ahead.”

Due to this perceived issue, United Airlines decided to cancel 35 round-trip flights out of Newark Airport per day.

“We feel like there is no other choice in order to protect our customers,” Kirby said in a letter to United Airlines passengers.

A spokesperson for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said in a statement to The U.S. Sun on behalf of Newark airport: “The Port Authority has invested billions to modernize Newark Liberty, but those improvements depend on a fully staffed and modern federal air traffic system.

“We continue to urge the FAA to address ongoing staffing shortages and accelerate long-overdue technology upgrades that continue to cause delays in the nation’s busiest air corridor,” the spokesperson said.