US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has unveiled an ambitious plan to yank American air traffic control systems out of the 1960s – and he wants Congress to fund the whole project up front so it doesn’t get derailed by political wind shifts.
Air traffic control systems managed by the Federal Aviation Administration are a notoriously outdated, with decades-old hardware and software contributing to nationwide ground stops and ultimately putting travelers at risk of being stranded in airports, stuck on runways, or, god forbid, forced to sleep at the airport. Despite that, modernization efforts have been slow, with past projections suggesting that many core systems wouldn’t be fully replaced until well into the 2030s.
Duffy’s proposal, unveiled Thursday, would put modernization measures into overdrive, outlining a three-year framework to overhaul key components of the National Airspace System (NAS). The plan aims to reverse decades of underinvestment and outdated infrastructure that, while still safe, increasingly causes delays, outages, and inefficiencies across the system.
“Without modernization efforts – including upgraded technology, improved air traffic management, and enhanced safety measures – the risk of system failures, disruptions, and security vulnerabilities will only increase,” the Department of Transportation said in its proposal.
The DoT’s NAS upgrade plans call for eliminating legacy time-division multiplexing systems and shifting to IP-based telecommunications, with new fiber, satellite, and wireless networks supporting over 30,000 services nationwide. Analog radios will be replaced with VoIP-capable equipment, legacy automation systems will be consolidated into two common platforms, and paper flight strips still used in towers will finally go digital under the Terminal Flight Data Manager program.
Some 618 aging radar systems, many dating back to the 1970s and well past their intended lifespan, would be replaced under the plan. The FAA also aims to deploy new automation systems to overhaul flight and airspace management, including modernizing traffic flow platforms and consolidating legacy control software. Information display systems from the 1990s — some still reliant on floppy disks and CDs — would finally be upgraded, and dozens of air traffic control facilities, which the proposal describes as “deteriorating at alarming rates,” would be rebuilt or replaced.
Building this new system is an economic and national security necessity, and the time to fix it is now
Many of the systems targeted in the proposal were not expected to be fully replaced until the 2030s or later under historical FAA funding levels. The DoT now aims to accelerate these upgrades within a three-year framework running through 2028.
“Building this new system is an economic and national security necessity, and the time to fix it is now,” Duffy said in a press release.
Commit now, Duffy urges Congress
Projects like these have a tendency to stall out. By way of example, officials have been trying to update the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system, which failed in early 2023 and caused the first nationwide ground stop since 9/11. The outage made international headlines and delayed thousands of flights. While Congress had introduced bills in 2019 and 2021 to push for improvements, it wasn’t until after the 2023 debacle that a task force was finally mandated to recommend fixes.
President Biden signed that last bill in June 2023, but the task force has flown extremely under the radar – there’s no press record of its recommendations, no easily findable website, nothing. And a task force isn’t exactly an allocation of funds. If it’s this hard to upgrade one single system, updating all the antiquated stuff air traffic controllers and pilots are forced to use sounds like Mission: Impossible.
Duffy’s well aware of the history. “I can’t just announce [the proposal] to you and say it’s going to happen in three to four years,” Duffy said during a Thursday press conference. “It’s going to take the help of the Congress to make that happen.”
So, to try and give his proposal the best chance of success, he wants Congress to finance the entire project up front.
“When you give small tranches of money year over year, politics change … and it never gets done,” Duffy lamented. Some permitting reform will be required too. “If we go through the permitting process and don’t get the money this is going to be the same old thing – it’s going to take us 10, 15 years to build this,” he said.
However, the proposal itself does not come with a price tag, so there’s no telling how much money that will end up being. Neither the DoT nor the FAA responded to questions for this story. ®