I have to suspect that anyone reduced to tears or suffering heart palpitations as a result of a 90 second glitch probably isn't cut out for the job anyway.
ATC is a stressful job. People wouldn't make it through training if they couldn't handle stress (albeit the burnout rate is still high). I went through part of the process at NATS (in the UK) and there was a Q&A with a recently qualified controller who was completely candid about the fact that at various points in your training you'd go and have a cry in the loos or your car. They wrung it out of you on a "train-hard, fight-easy" basis.
But what happened at Newark is basically never-never "you're a passenger in a car going over a cliff" territory.
Lose radar? That's bad, but you have headings and you can talk to the aircraft, let them know the situation, keep people parked in their stacks and potentially talk to other control centres to have them take over (at least for aircraft declaring low fuel, etc).
Lose comms? Well at least you can call other control centres and tell them "Hey, you need to move this aircraft and that aircraft".
ATC train for loss of tech. They can fall back to paper (albeit at a loss of capacity).
To lose all radar and comms is basically a matter of "go to the break room, turn on CNN and watch the aircraft crash that you were responsible for". You've got airliners with hundreds of pax doing 400kts and they're basically onto visual flight rules - except you haven't told them that. Because you have no comms. And even if they were all neatly on diverging paths in your sector, at 400kts some of them will be leaving your sector soon (and other joining) and if those controllers are sat around you looking at their similarly dead consoles... well bugger. Your diverging paths weren't necessarily clear through the next sector or the one after that.
It's a high responsibility job and you have been left with nothing. And momentarily that's bad, but recoverable. About 45seconds into staring at a blank screen with no radio and having called everyone you have a landline to saying "we got nothing" you'd be getting very stressed about where the hell the backup is. At 75 seconds? Yeah, you kick back and either laugh or cry because what else is there to do? And I'd be worried about the ones who were laughing.
I don't know what US shift patterns look like of ocurse. Back when I looked at it here in the UK, the general imtimation was that you couldn't spend more than 45 minutes on console between breaks, and usually they had enough staffing that you'd be relieved before making it to 40. In an 8-hour shift you'd be unlikely to log more than 4 hours on console.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
