The May 9 outage came after a similar incident on April 28 caused air traffic control computer screens to briefly go dark, PEOPLE previously reported. The woman told The Times that the previous communications outage had lasted around 90 seconds, and resulted in five of her fellow controllers ending up "on 45 days of trauma leave."
"To be without eyes or ears in air traffic control for a full minute and a half is absolutely terrifying. But now here I was, alone, facing the same fate," she told the U.K. paper, revealing that "anything can happen" during a 90-second blackout, including planes turning the wrong way and jumping from 2,000ft to 4,500ft.
"Being at the controls without any of our signals is like trying to dodge mines without a mine detector," the controller wrote, per the outlet, claiming that her supervisor was on duty, but "wasn’t actually working air traffic."
"His job is essentially to react if anything goes wrong, including making calls to other air traffic facilities," she explained.
Admitting she "knew how to act" because of the time she'd spent doing the job, the worker shared, "I found a radar scope that, miraculously, still seemed to be working, and I managed to reconnect with the departing plane I had been speaking to seconds before the dropout."
She said that she was able to recover "contact with all four planes" after "all the frequencies came back" after 90 seconds, the outlet stated, noting that yet another blackout had occurred two days later, on May 11.
"I was so shaken by the incident, I was put on stress-related trauma leave the following day and I’m undergoing psychological evaluation," the controller wrote for the outlet. "I haven’t returned to work — but this concerns me, too, because it means there are even fewer controllers managing the skies around Newark."
"If Newark’s air traffic control problems don’t get fixed, I believe it’s only a matter of time before we have a fatal crash between two planes," she claimed.
"The troubles started last summer when the government forced Newark’s air controllers out of our central hub in Long Island, which previously oversaw aircraft flow to all three New York airports — Newark, LaGuardia and JFK — to where we are now, in Philadelphia," the person added.
