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

First came curses, then tears.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.