The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Tuesday announced the deployment of a new radar at Newark Liberty International Airport that’s designed to prevent incidents from occurring on busy runways.
The new radar, known as the Surface Movement Radar Model 4, allows air traffic controllers to track aircraft and vehicles on runways and taxiways in all weather and visibility conditions and prevent runway incursions that could result in accidental collisions. The SMR-4 will represent a capability improvement over the 30-year-old radar that’s being replaced.
FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford spoke at the event and said that it was the deployment of the fifth surface movement radar in the U.S.
“We will deploy 53 of these surface movement radars across the country at our top 44 busiest airports in the U.S.,” Bedford said, adding that the radar system was built in Syracuse, New York, as onshoring production of critical infrastructure was a key component of the agency’s modernization effort.
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“We think of modernization not just as replacing all of this old equipment. And again, this is a 30-year-old box: we can’t maintain it, they don’t build it, they don’t supply replacement parts for it. So when these things break, they’re no longer available to us, so getting this investment is critical,” he explained.
“It’s not just that we’re purchasing and deploying new equipment, we have brought these jobs back to the U.S. which is a key focus of the secretary and the president,” Bedford said.
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Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who also spoke at the unveiling, noted that the surface awareness radar will “give us better technology to see airplanes, to see vehicles on the ground at Newark Airport. It’ll see aircraft on final approach. It is a more resilient system,” he added.
“It allows controllers on a dark night, or controllers in bad weather, if they can’t see out of the tower and see what’s happening on the tarmac, they can actually use this radar to see on their screens where everything is at – airplanes, vehicles – and again, it keeps the American public safer as we use American skies,” Duffy said.
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The Department of Transportation and FAA noted in a release that they’ve installed 96 new systems around the country over the last year that are related to the agency’s surface awareness initiative.
FAA data shows that there have been 1,102 runway incursions in the agency’s fiscal year 2026 so far – down from 1,197 in the same period a year ago. The data includes operational incidents, pilot deviations, vehicle or pedestrian deviations, and other forms of incursions.
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