Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy during a Breitbart News policy event on Friday said that the Big Beautiful Bill upgrades America’s “atrocious” air traffic control (ATC) system.
Duffy said that the Transportation Department needs $31.5 billion to upgrade the dilapidated traffic control system.
“The Congress in One Big Beautiful Bill gave us $12.5 billion, and they were very specific about how we could use that money. It’s for new radar, radios, the key part of this goes back to what happened in Newark,” Duffy said at the Breitbart News policy event. “We had a telecom outage, it was a 30 second outage for the scopes to reboot, it took a minute and a half, without any scopes or radar. That’s actually very concerning for everybody. We worked with Verizon to rebuild those, but shows how old a lot of our telecom is, we’re going to transition from copper to fiber, analog to digital.”
Duffy added that a new air traffic control system will have new software and automation and that the Trump administration wants to move “as quickly as possible.”
The Transportation secretary said that President Donald Trump knows the “problem we have with our airspace” and he has put “100 percent support” behind fixing the ATC.
During a press conference in May, Duffy unveiled the administration’s plan for a new “state of the art air traffic control system,” which leaders believe will be the “envy of the world.”
Plans for the upgraded ATC system include:
* Replacing antiquated telecommunications with new fiber, wireless, and satellite technologies at over 4,600 sites, including 25,000 new radios and 475 new voice switches.
* Replacing 618 radars which have gone past their life cycle.
* Addressing runway safety by increasing the number of airports with Surface Awareness Initiative (SAI) to 200.
* Building six new air traffic control centers for the first time since the 1960s and replacing towers and TRACON (Terminal Radar Approach Control) facilities.
* Installing new modern hardware and software for all air traffic facilities to create a common platform system throughout towers, TRACONs, and centers.
* Addressing the specific challenges that face Alaska by adding 174 new weather stations.
“We can talk about politics all day long, blame on the shutdown, what’s great about this issue is this is bipartisan. Everybody agrees this has to be done,” Duffy said at the Breitbart News policy event.
