The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is investigating a 90-second outage at Denver International Airport earlier this week that left some 20 pilots unable to communicate with air traffic control.
FAA Deputy Chief Operating Officer Frank McIntosh confirmed the incident during a congressional hearing Thursday, explaining that both the primary and backup radio frequencies failed, forcing controllers to switch to an emergency frequency to communicate. While some reports claimed the outage lasted up to six minutes, McIntosh dismissed those accounts as “overexaggerated.”
“Aircraft remained safely separated and there were no impacts to operations,” the FAA said in a statement.
Monday’s communications failure comes on the heels of two major radar and radio outages in the past two and a half weeks at a facility responsible for managing air traffic in and out of Newark Airport.
At a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing Thursday, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy addressed concerns, saying, “I believe the system is safe. There are multiple redundancies throughout the system that keep people safe. Even the frustrations in Newark when we’ve slowed traffic down, the key is not efficiency, the key is safety.”
