Prime Minister Mark Carney will miss a Monday roundtable at the United Nations General Assembly after a communications failure at a Philadelphia air traffic control facility grounded flights across the New York area, throwing travel into chaos as roughly 130 world leaders converged on the city for UN meetings.
The Federal Aviation Administration said a primary telecommunications circuit failed at the Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach Control facility on Monday morning, and a backup fibre line that should have taken over had already been severed at a construction site in New Jersey, between Newark and New Brunswick. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said the primary circuit failed Monday morning and that repairing the damaged fibre would take about 13 hours.
The outage triggered ground stops at Newark Liberty International, Philadelphia International, Teterboro, John F. Kennedy International and LaGuardia airports, with delays also spreading to Boston’s Logan International as air traffic was diverted, CBS New York and CNN reported. More than 1,000 flights were snarled in the first hours of the disruption, and nearly 4,000 flights were delayed nationwide with about 500 cancelled, according to flight tracking data cited by multiple outlets. Newark alone accounted for more than 1,000 delayed or cancelled flights, with the average delay there running 112 minutes.
Carney’s office said the prime minister would still fly to New York later Monday night but would skip the day’s scheduled appearance at the Partners for Multilateralism summit, a roundtable on strengthening international co-operation. Canada’s ambassador to the UN, David Lametti, filled in for Carney at the session, appearing alongside European Council President Antonio Costa and Kenyan President William Ruto, Bloomberg News reported.
Carney is still expected to take part in a Tuesday discussion on a two-state solution for the Middle East and to hold sideline meetings with other leaders through Wednesday, his office said.
The travel disruption landed in the middle of a tense stretch for Canada-U.S. relations. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has accused Canada of walking away from trade talks and has suggested Canada could instead seek closer ties with the European Union, Bloomberg reported. Carney has spent recent months trying to knit together middle power economies, including the EU and the Pacific trade bloc known as the CPTPP, as a hedge against pressure from both Washington and Beijing.
Monday’s UN gathering drew dozens of heads of state and government ministers to New York for the annual General Assembly session, making the airport disruption especially costly for international travel timed to the summit. The FAA said it was working to install a replacement circuit and that flight operations were gradually resuming through the afternoon, though it urged passengers to check with their airlines directly for updates on individual flights.
