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“The Federal Aviation Administration said the facility that handles Newark air traffic on Monday lost radio frequencies for about two seconds, the latest in a series of telecom issues… The incidents highlight the air traffic control network's aging infrastructure and come after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy earlier this month proposed spending billions of dollars to fix it over the next three to four years…
“Newark air traffic has also been hit by a series of telecom outages including a serious incident on April 28 that led to dozens of flight diversions. The FAA last year relocated control of Newark's airspace to Philadelphia to address staffing and congested New York City-area traffic. Last week, the FAA said it was convening an emergency task force and fast-tracking urgent steps to prevent additional telecom outages at the facility overseeing Newark air traffic.” Reuters
Many on both sides support privatizing air traffic control:
“Both parties in Congress could and should have prioritized spending on air traffic control improvements over electric-vehicle chargers and mass transit boondoggles in the 2021 infrastructure bill. But a bigger challenge than funding is a shortage of technical expertise and controllers that owe in large part to federal laws and labor agreements…
“These include wage limits that make it hard to hire skilled engineers and a mandatory retirement age of 56 for controllers. Union rules can also prevent the agency from automating systems and moving controllers to facilities with worker shortages. Putting air traffic control in the hands of a private nonprofit a la Canada would remove some of these obstacles. Alas, Mr. Duffy’s plan doesn’t propose that. More spending won’t be enough unless Congress also modernizes the outdated bureaucracy.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“The Trump/Duffy proposal is flawed in a host of ways, the most egregious of which is that it preserves the current ATC-governance structure. Blue-ribbon commissions and independent experts have long argued that this structure is the underlying source of our nation’s ATC problems. Simply stated, air-traffic control is a 24/7 high-tech operation trapped inside a regulatory agency…
“The Clinton administration’s 1995 bill to corporatize ATC was dead on arrival in Congress primarily because of pushback from private pilots and corporate-jet owners… The same dynamic played out in 2018… As regrettable as it is, the crisis facing our nation’s ATC system gives the Trump administration political leverage. The current proposal squanders that leverage, promising the aviation sector tens of billions of taxpayer dollars with no accompanying [governance] reform.”
Dorothy Robyn, The Atlantic
Other opinions below.
“According to Bill McGee of the American Economic Liberties Project… there are about three times as many flights as in 1985, but roughly the same number of air traffic controllers, creating extreme shortages. The mess at Newark was partly the result of controllers being transferred on an emergency basis to Philadelphia…
“Even worse, as McGee points out, is the crazy quilt of technical systems for air traffic control that are decades behind their European counterparts. Some airports use antiquated radar for air traffic control, while others use satellites. At the same airport, some runways rely on radar while others rely on satellites. Incredibly, in some cases the same runway uses different technical communications systems depending on which direction a plane lands…
“Modernizing the system will take tens of billions of dollars, and more than one administration. How did the Trump administration begin? As part of the DOGE project, the FAA fired some 400 employees. They included critical technical staff responsible for repairing air traffic control systems when they go down and updating digital maps that pilots use in flight.”
Robert Kuttner, American Prospect
“‘Someone should have seen this coming in the last administration,’ Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy complained [last week] on CNBC. In fact, lots of people saw it coming. Regulators, pilots, controllers, airline executives, and outside observers all warned for years that the system was falling behind and running on outdated technology. Yet successive presidential administrations and Congresses didn’t act, lulled into a false sense of stability…
“Although these issues predate the current administration, the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service have done further damage… We can and should improve how the government works, but we can’t actually get something for nothing.”
David A. Graham, The Atlantic
“Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy came up with a smart, fast fix to the immediate staffing crisis (which brings serious safety concerns as well as delayed/canceled flight chaos): Keep senior controllers working a bit longer. He’d offer cash bonuses to controllers below the mandatory retirement age of 56 to keep them on the job, and maybe work out waivers so some could serve past 56 until turning 61…
“Extra pay for crucial work, on a totally voluntary basis with an eye to ending a terrible and worsening problem: Who could have a problem with that? Why, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association… The union’s rationale: ‘Each waiver puts early retirement at risk by showing the Agency [the FAA] and Congress that mandatory retirement is unnecessary.’ That is, a policy that plays a crucial role in driving controller shortages might be ‘unnecessary,’ and NATCA doesn’t want that fact exposed.”
Editorial Board, New York Post
“We have Waymos and Teslas driving autonomously on city streets, yet our skies are controlled by radar, radios, floppy disks, paper strips (yes, literally paper) and computer visuals out of the 1983 movie ‘WarGames.’ The [FAA] has been working on a modernized NextGen air-traffic control system conceived in 2003, set to roll out in 2025, oops, check that, 2030, but really more like 2040…
“Meanwhile, Mr. Duffy wants billions to Band-Aid today’s antiquated system. There has to be a better way… Almost all commercial and many private planes already broadcast their GPS location, direction and speed via Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B). Why not harness that data?… Open-source 3-D-world engines exist—Godot, Open 3D Engine—that could easily be adapted… I’d bet with the right data feed, the DOGE bros could track every U.S. flight in three dimensions and living color this year.”
Andy Kessler, Wall Street Journal
