Why Newark Departures Are Still Late After Monday's Outage

Newark is still working through Monday. PBS (22 September 2026, 10:27 a.m. ET) said flights were moving again at the New York airports after a Philadelphia TRACON outage: the primary comms line failed, the backup fiber was cut, and EWR took no commercial landings from about 9:40 a.m. to 5:20 p.m. Monday. More than 600 flights into and out of Newark were cancelled that day. FlightAware’s early-Tuesday snapshot — about 40 delays and 60 cancellations still on the board — is a MiseryMap count, not a FlightLabs field. Do not paste those two numbers into JSON.

What the API stores is the board, flight by flight. On 22 September we called GET /flight_delays with dep_iata=EWR, type=departures, and delay=60 (the live feed rejects a floor at or below 30 minutes). The body had 39 rows (11 active, 28 scheduled). The same hour, /flights-schedules?iataCode=EWR&type=departure returned 929 departures: 107 active, 813 scheduled, 9 landed, 0 cancelled, and 87 with dep_delayed ≥ 15. Different filters, different counts — persist the array, not FlightAware’s ticker.

Pull EWR departures that are actually late

Auth is access_key. Filter the departure airport with dep_iata=EWR. Starter is $24.99/mo (4,000 calls) with a 7-day trial (or 50 requests). Docs: GET /flight_delays.

curl "https://api.goflightlabs.com/flight_delays?access_key=YOUR_KEY&delay=60&type=departures&dep_iata=EWR"

Live row from that call on 22 September 2026 (one of 39; not the 2024 CZ6890 docs fixture):

{
"status": 200,
"success": true,
"data": [
{
"flight_iata": "VA8141",
"dep_iata": "EWR",
"arr_iata": "LAX",
"dep_time": "2026-09-22 10:30",
"dep_estimated": "2026-09-22 11:47",
"status": "active",
"delayed": 232,
"dep_delayed": 77,
"arr_delayed": 262
}
]
}

dep_delayed is minutes past the scheduled push. delayed / arr_delayed can be larger when the arrival estimate slips further. The rest of the array is omitted here. This is not /airports (today’s lookup post) and not a fare. JFK and LGA take the same dep_iata swap if you are clearing the whole Northeast board.

Go live

Watch EWR departures as JSON →