May 8 (UPI) — The nation’s aging air traffic control system will be replaced with one that is aimed at 21st-century needs while improving safety, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced Thursday.
“We are seizing a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a brand new, state-of-the-art air traffic control system,” Duffy said in a Federal Aviation Administration news release.
“Decades of neglect have left us with an outdated system that is showing its age,” Duffy said. “Building this new system is an economic and national security necessity, and the time to fix it is now.”
The new systems will enhance safety, lessen delays, and unlock the future of air travel, the news release stated.
It also will ensure air traffic controllers have a reliable system to effectively manage and direct air traffic at the nation’s airports.
Duffy said a coalition that includes labor and industrial interests is helping to design a modern system that greatly improves upon the existing one.
Industry experts in March affirmed the need to modernize the nation’s air traffic control system.
The proposed plan has four components for improving infrastructure: communications, surveillance, automation and facilities.
It seeks to replace old telecommunications systems with new fiber, wireless and satellite technologies at more than 4,600 sites and install 25,000 new radios and 475 new voice switches.
The plan also requires replacing 618 radar systems that have exceeded their intended life cycles.
The number of airports participating in the SurfaceAwareness Initiative is to increase to 200 and reduce the number of close calls between aircraft.
The FAA also seeks to build six new air traffic control centers, which would be the first new ones in six decades.
Installing new hardware and software for all air traffic control facilities will standardize their operations, while adding 174 new weather stations in Alaska will improve air travel safety there.
Aerospace accounts for 5% of the nation’s gross domestic product, which equals $1.25 trillion and supports more than 2 million jobs, according to the FAA.
Aviation “is one of the nation’s most important national security, economic and geostrategic assets,” the FAA’s BrandNew Air Traffic Control System report says.
“It is critical the United States acts now to invest and modernize a National Airspace System that supports the future and moves beyond the 1960s,” it concludes.
No price tag or timeline has been placed on the plan, which was announced after the Trump administration in February fired hundreds of FAA probationary workers.