Mapped: The 165 flights diverted during air traffic chaos when a fiber-optic cable was accidentally cut
Workers at the site where the cable was inadvertently cut in New Jersey.
New Jersey Transit An air traffic control outage caused travel chaos in the northeast on Monday.
Business Insider mapped how over 150 flights were diverted to dozens of different airports.
Construction workers had accidentally cut a Verizon cable, which has since been repaired.
Thought you had a bad Monday? A construction crew accidentally cut a Verizon fiber-optic cable, leading to over 150 flight diversions and hundreds more cancellations.
The mishap caused an air traffic control outage at a Philadelphia facility that manages flights in the northeast.
A circuit there had failed, and authorities then discovered that the backup cable had been cut, said Bryan Bedford, who leads the Federal Aviation Administration.
New Jersey Transit said its contractors were working about 10 feet from utility markings, and it was trying to determine whether Verizon or the contractors had made the markings.
A Business Insider analysis of Flightradar24 data found 165 flights bound for Newark, LaGuardia, John F.
Kennedy, and Philadelphia Airports diverted elsewhere on Monday.
Newark Airport bore the brunt of the chaos: 109 diverted flights were scheduled to land there.
Around 20 headed to each of the other three.
Washington, DC, was the most common city that pilots re-routed to, with 22 airplanes diverting to Dulles International Airport.
Meanwhile, 10 flights ended up at Lehigh Valley, a small domestic airport near Allentown, Pennsylvania.
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