White House overhaul of troubled air traffic control system will cost ‘lots of billions’

The Trump administration on Thursday proposed a multibillion-dollar overhaul of a U.S. air traffic control system that it said still relies on floppy disks and replacement parts found on eBay and has come under renewed scrutiny in the wake of recent deadly plane crashes and technical failures.

The plan calls for six new air traffic control centers, along with an array of technology and communications upgrades at all of the nation’s air traffic facilities over the next three or four years, said Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.

“We use radar from the 1970s,” said Duffy, who compared the proposal with upgrading from a flip phone to a smartphone. “This technology is 50 years old that our controllers use to scan the skies and keep airplanes separated from one another.”

How much it will all cost wasn’t immediately revealed. Duffy said he’ll work with Congress on the details.

“It’s going to be billions, lots of billions,” he said.

The plan has an aggressive timeline, calling on everything to be finished by 2028—although Duffy said it may take another year.

Demands to fix the aging system that handles more than 45,000 daily flights have increased since the midair collision in January between an Army helicopter and a commercial airliner that killed 67 people over Washington, D.C.

That crash—and a string of other crashes and mishaps—showed the immediate need for these upgrades, Duffy said in front of airline officials, union leaders and family members of those who died in the crash near Reagan National Airport.

The proposal sets out to add fiber, wireless or satellite technology at more than 4,600 locations, replace 618 radars and more than quadruple the number of airports with systems designed to reduce near misses on runways.

Six new air traffic control centers also would be built under the plan, and new hardware and software would be standardized across all air traffic facilities.

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee last week budgeted $12.5 billion to overhaul the system, but that estimate came out before the Transportation Department revealed its plan. Duffy said the final price tag will be higher.

U.S. Rep. Sam Graves of Missouri, who heads the House transportation committee, called the amount only a “down payment.”

To build the system quickly, as planned, Duffy said Congress must give the Federal Aviation Administration all the money up front and streamline the permitting process.

“The system we have here? It’s not worth saving. I don’t need to preserve any of this. It’s too old,” Duffy said.

Trump said Thursday that the plan will revolutionize flying. “The new equipment is unbelievable what it does,” he said from the Oval Office. He began to say it may even alleviate the need for pilots before adding, “In my opinion, you always need pilots. But you wouldn’t even have to have pilots.”

The newly revealed proposal appears to have wide support across the aviation industry—from airline CEOs to the unions representing controllers and pilots—but this is just the beginning and many details haven’t been revealed.

Duffy quickly said the plan will not involve privatizing the air traffic control system, as Trump had supported in his first term.

Following the midair crash near Washington, Trump promised to fix what he called “an old, broken system” and to tackle the nationwide shortage of air traffic controllers while blaming the previous Biden administration for both problems.

But the weaknesses within the air traffic control system have been highlighted for years in hearings before Congress and government reports. The struggles to keep up with increasing air traffic has been recognized since the 1990s—long before either Trump or Biden took office.

The Trump administration’s overhaul plan will need enough funding to be more effective than previous reform efforts during the last three decades. Already more than $14 billion has been invested in upgrades since 2003 but none have dramatically changed how the system works.

The FAA has been working since the mid-2000s to make upgrades through its NextGen program.

One of the biggest challenges with a massive upgrade is that the FAA must keep the current system operating while developing a new system and then find a way to seamlessly switch over. That’s partly why the agency has pursued more gradual improvements in the past.

The shortage of controllers and technical breakdowns came to the forefront in the last two weeks when a radar system briefly failed at the Newark, New Jersey, airport, leading to a wave of flight cancellations and delays.

Without the planned upgrades, those breakdowns will be repeated around the nation, Duffy said. “Newark has been a prime example of what happens when this old equipment goes down,” he said.