Federal officials announced multiple technical upgrades and increased staffing after controllers lost all radar and radio contact with aircraft for approximately 90 seconds.

On April 28 at about 1:27 p.m. local time, the air traffic controllers monitoring the skies above New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport came face to face with their worst-case scenario: With radar and radio contact suddenly cut,

Recent chaos at Newark airport underscores just how tough it is to solve the nationwide shortage of air-traffic controllers that has been decades in the making. A brief outage during which controllers lost contact with flights in and out of the nation’s 12th busiest airport last week preceded widespread delays and cancellations that began this past weekend.