A leading lawmaker from the nation’s most interconnected air travel state warned that outdated technology – like “floppy disks” – and ongoing air traffic control (ATC) crises at key hubs are compounding the need to overhaul the U.S. air travel system.
Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, who also sits on the Aviation subcommittee on the Senate Commerce and Transportation Committee, spoke to Fox News Digital exclusively on Wednesday as the crisis mounted, most recently in the Philadelphia ATC sector; specifically at Newark-Liberty International Airport.
The Last Frontier has the least miles of roads per capita and hundreds of communities where air travel is the only relatively realistic or reliable mode.
Sullivan said that it is not only in his state’s interest to see such an overhaul, but that – just as the Philadelphia sector has seen issues as of late – the Anchorage air traffic control hub itself controls individual flight patterns almost anywhere between Chicago and Tokyo.
Bering Air crash, left, Sen. Sullivan, center, EWR, right (NTSB, Getty, Getty)
“We help the entire country when people are traveling from the Lower 48 over to Asia,” he said.
“What we need to do is we need to preemptively address challenges before they become tragedies,” said Sullivan, who spoke out similarly at a commerce hearing with NTSB and FAA officials earlier this year.
He also cited a February passenger airliner crash in his own state, when a plane went down on Norton Sound’s sea ice after leaving Unalakleet for Nome, killing 10.
“What happens, unfortunately, is too often tragedy is what inspires and motivates reform,” he said, adding that the Department of Transportation should and likely will, under Secretary Sean Duffy, pivot to “predict[ing] and preempt[ing].”
On a recent tour of the Anchorage center, he spoke to FAA workers and saw how they, like other sectors, rely on 20th-century floppy disks and “strips of paper that are like post-it notes.”
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Crash of Bering Air 208B near Unalakleet, Alaska. (NTSB)
“What we don’t want, unfortunately – it’s happened – is have a big crash and tragedy as the thing that inspires change,” he said, placing the blame most recently on the Biden administration, in part, for appearing to prioritize diversity over substantive reforms at USDOT.
“I watched this: Hiring people for the FAA in terms of air traffic controllers is competitive. It requires real schooling. It requires high performance. And the Biden team came in, and I guess in the name of diversity… they started taking people off the street literally with no background in any of this. We’ve got to get back to the rigorous FAA standards,” he said.
He said he spoke with Duffy on Tuesday and predicted “a really big comprehensive reform program” in the weeks and months to come.
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Newark Airport in New Jersey (Getty)
“We have the safest aviation system in the world, but that doesn’t happen through magic. That happens through diligence, through upgrading our technology.”
While not directly addressing the situation in Newark, Sullivan praised the Trump administration’s “outstanding” response to the Unalakleet crash and predicted the Department of Transportation would handle the Newark-Liberty incident in a similarly effective manner.
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has defended his tenure, writing on X that “we put safety first, drove down close calls, grew [ATC] and had zero commercial airline fatalities out of millions of flights on our watch.”
