Transportation celebrates air traffic control modernization, asks lawmakers for more funding

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy celebrated progress on the effort to modernize the U.S. air traffic control system on Tuesday, a year after rolling out a plan to do so, reminding Congress that he wants more money to finish the job. 

A few workstreams are a “little behind,” but “for the most part, we’re on track to have this project completed before President [Donald] Trump leaves office,” Duffy said at a Transportation event celebrating the approximate one-year mark of the push to overhaul the air traffic control system within four years with new core infrastructure across automation, communication, surveillance and facilities.

“Congress should have faith in this DOT, in this FAA, because we are building, and we’re building now,” said Duffy, repeatedly emphasizing that his agency needs more funding to move the system from the analog world to the digital one. Congress put $12.5 billion toward the effort in Republicans’ ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ last summer, but Duffy has said that the plan will cost over $31 billion.

The government has been trying to modernize the U.S. national airspace system since 2003, with little success. That effort, called the Next Generation Air Transportation System, or NextGen, was billed as a sweeping overhaul, but it yielded “only a fraction of the expected benefits” before the program’s office was shut down last year, according to DOT’s watchdog.

Bryan Bedford, head of the Federal Aviation Administration, told senators at a hearing last December that he was presented with a 680-page document last summer after he was confirmed, which he and Duffy decided to “scrap,” he said, “because it represented more of the same.”

Transportation tapped Peraton as the prime integrator for the new plan, focused on the air traffic control system and not the entire national airspace system, late last year. 

The department said Tuesday that it has so far replaced almost 50% of the copper wires — which date back to the 1960s — within the air traffic telecommunication system. 

Duffy also touted work done to install digital voice switches on radios at 40 locations nationwide, updating systems from a switchboard-like tool to a digital one.

DOT has also set up new surface awareness systems at 54 airports to help track planes and vehicles at airports, and it has transitioned 17 air traffic control towers to electronic flight strips — a digital solution to keep track of flights rather than using paper. 

By the end of 2028, the department is aiming to update thousands of radios and network connections, hundreds of radars and more. Duffy has also emphasized the potential role of artificial intelligence when it comes to improving flight management. 

Nick Daniels, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, emphasized Tuesday that the technology advances being discussed are “not competition for the controller workforce.”

“What we bring to the table cannot be replicated,” he said. “It’s not a trade-off of controllers or equipment. It’s how we support controllers that are doing the job day in and day out.”

The FAA is modernizing at the same time as it’s trying to hire video game players as air traffic controllers at the agency, which has had staffing issues for years. 

The modernization push is one of three pillars the FAA reorganized itself around earlier this year, alongside people and safety. Aviation safety has been in the spotlight since a midair collision near Ronald Reagan National Airport of an Army Black Hawk helicopter and a commercial flight last year killed 67 people.

In 2023, the FAA evaluated all its air traffic control systems after an outage of one system caused a shutdown of national airspace for about two hours while the over 30-year-old system was fixed. The outage caused over 1,300 flight cancellations.

Of 138 systems evaluated at the time by the FAA, half were deemed either unsustainable or potentially unsustainable, despite their critical impacts on the safety and efficiency of national airspace, according to the Government Accountability Office.