Asking Congress for tens of billions of dollars doesn’t seem like a big ask for a new nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. However, lawmakers get sheepish if you want to modernize the country’s crumbling air traffic control infrastructure. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy unveiled his plan to fix aviation safety last Thursday, blandly titled “Brand New Air Traffic Control System.” He wouldn’t attach a price tag to the revamp plan, but groups within the aviation industry believe it will cost $31 billion. However, the revamp would worryingly involve giving a single contract to one company.
The framework document outlining the “Brand New Air Traffic Control System” emphasized the urgency of how dated and broken the current infrastructure is. The eight-page summary directly referenced the 2023 NOTAM system failure that caused the first nationwide ground stop since 9/11. The proposal’s scale is monumental. It would involve digitizing flight management systems at nearly 90 airports, replacing over 25,000 radios and modernizing over 600 airborne radar systems. In three years, air traffic controllers will move from tracking planes with handwriting on paper strips to computer terminals.
Sparing no expense to fix air traffic control
Despite the Trump administration’s obsession with reducing federal spending and recklessly gutting the government, the White House is seemingly willing to spare no expense to get this done and is successfully begging Congress for the money. According to Politico, the House Transportation Committee approved $12.5 billion to modernize air traffic control. However, Committee Chair Sam Graves stated that the massive sum was only a “down payment.” The Modern Skies Coalition estimates that it will cost $31 billion. The group advocates for industry modernization and includes nearly the entire industry in some capacity, from aerospace giant Boeing to the Teamsters.
There’s a plan and there’s a vague price tag, so who’s going to do the work? President Donald Trump phoned into Duffy’s press conference to state that the administration wants to award only a single contract for the entire project. According to FlightGlobal, He said through Duffy’s smartphone:
“The ancient infrastructure is buckling. We’d like to give out one big beautiful contract, where they are responsible for everything from digging ditches to the most-complicated stuff.”
One big, beautiful contract
It seems like a recipe for disaster to hand out a single contract for this massive project. Trump said that they were already in talks with multiple bidders, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility that SpaceX is bidding for the $31 billion contract. Elon Musk’s private space company was tasked by the President in January to diagnose the problems with air traffic control. In February, the FAA also awarded a contract to Starlink to be its new backbone for weather information transmissions. This just seems like another opportunity to shovel money into Musk’s bank account.
The White House shouldn’t be using the desperate situation to give massive sums of money to its allies. The growing public apprehension to fly caused by January’s fatal mid-air collision at Reagan National Airport hasn’t been calmed by the administration’s response of shifting blame elsewhere. The crisis is only getting worse with the disturbing outages at Newark-Liberty International Airport over the past weeks. The facility’s air traffic controllers endured 90-second intervals where they lost communications with planes and the aircraft weren’t visible on radar. It was compounded by personnel going on leave to deal with the traumatic experience, because they knew how grave the outcome could’ve been.
