By Colleen Mondor

Nov. 4, 2025, © Leeham News: The US Air Traffic Control (ATC) system is melting down as the US federal government shutdown takes its toll on an already overstressed, understaffed, underfunded, antiquated system.

A deadly mid-air collision on Jan. 29 this year, several near-collisions between airliners on the ground, and system slowdowns plague the ATC system.

In the past few months, there has been a flurry of announcements from the Department of Transportation (DOT) and the FAA concerning plans to upgrade and modernize the ATC system.

The new system, which, according to Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, enjoys “an unprecedented coalition of support,” is projected to cost $31.5bn and will take 3-4 years to complete—a timeline that draws skepticism from many aviation circles.

The DOT website insists the program will be the envy of the world and “enhance safety in the sky, reduce delays, and unlock the future of air travel.” It lists critical actions in the plan as:

• Replacing antiquated telecommunications: with new fiber, wireless, and satellite technologies at over 4,600 sites, 25,000 new radios, and 475 new voice switches.
• Replacing 618 radars that have gone past their life cycle.
• Addressing runway safety by increasing the number of airports with the Surface Awareness Initiative to 200.
• Building six new air traffic control centers for the first time since the 1960s and replacing towers and TRACONs.
• Installing new modern hardware and software for all air traffic facilities to create a standard platform system throughout towers, TRACONs, and centers.
• Addressing the challenges that Alaska faces by adding 174 new weather stations.

A proposed timeline for the system’s actions can be found here.

“Working at the speed of Trump”

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford at the Oshkosh Air Show. Credit: FAA.

To rapidly accomplish this massive plan, the DOT and FAA have altered the procurement process, which will now, according to Duffy, be “working at the speed of Trump.”

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford laid earlier failures at the feet of the previous administration, telling an audience at the Oshkosh air show in July that “Nobody in the Biden Administration had any interest in aviation.”

He also lamented that ATC had not been modernized in 40 years, declaring, “We can do a better job in leadership. We can help the FAA figure out a strategy, especially around modernization.”

What neither Bedford nor Duffy discussed is how or why other ATC modernization plans were unsuccessful, especially the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen), whose moratorium was published by the DOT Office of Inspector General (OIG) on Sept. 29.

The OIG, which said the FAA had invested over $15bn into the program through December 2024, highlighted delays and cost growth, which negatively impacted NextGen over its 20-year lifespan. (One consistent problem with the media’s coverage of NextGen is confusion over congressional authorization versus appropriation, something that comes up repeatedly with funding for ATC. That issue remains unchanged for Bedford and Duffy’s plan.)

Because Congress authorized funding but did not promptly appropriate it, the funding became problematic for NextGen. (Even worse in that period was 23 stopgap bills.) Like everything else, the FY 2026 transportation appropriations bill is stuck. When people say that the Big Beautiful Bill has $12.5bn for the FAA, they mean authorized but not appropriated.

The OIG reported that only about 16% of the program’s total benefits were achieved through last year. Some of the key features the report listed to avoid a repeat of NextGen’s problems were establishing “realistic long-term plans”, managing “increased sustainment and operating costs” and “navigating workforce challenges.”

NextGen does little to improve the system

For Congress, such details support their concerns of avoiding “NextGen 2.0”. The plan’s reputation is so negative that in an interview in September with The Spokesman-Review, former House Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman Bill Shuster (R-PA) said, “NextGen has really done not much of anything to improve the system.”

This perception, along with worries that the projected budget for Duffy’s Brand New Air Traffic Control System will not be spent wisely, fuels current congressional discussions on ATC’s future.

What is lacking in reportage on the subject is the repetitive nature of exaggerated promises and plans, followed by setbacks, shutdowns, and subsequent finger-pointing that have accompanied all previous ATC modernization programs. That pattern can be traced to the presidency of John F. Kennedy, and, based on Duffy’s optimistic timeline of 3-4 years, there is no reason to assume it will be any different now.

NextGen dates to the 2003 Vision 100—Century of Aviation Reauthorization Act, which established the Joint Planning and Development Office (JPDO). This group was tasked to “create a unified vision of what the US National Airspace System should deliver for the next generation and beyond.” Charged with coordinating all government departments involved in the upgrade, as well as industry stakeholders, which were a key component of NextGen’s projected success, JPDO had its funding erased by Congress in 2014, during the Obama Administration.

FAA fails to define a role

According to the House Appropriations Committee, this step was necessary as the FAA “failed to establish a clearly defined role for the JPDO and set expectations for how it will leverage research conducted at other federal agencies.” In its wake, the FAA formed the Interagency Planning Office whose duties sounded remarkably similar to those of the JPDO but included a mission to “to improve efficiencies, reduce redundancy and ensure compatibility across federal agencies, while pooling resources and investments.”

From the beginning, planning and funding were key issues for NextGen, primarily as its extensive program requirements hinged on the support of public and private entities and the completion of various components to advance.

In 2007, the Washington Post reported that the Congressional Research Service estimated the upgrade could cost $65bn-$75bn. However, that issue became moot when the FAA’s authorization expired months later. Congress became mired in a five-year battle that resulted in the agency suffering through 23 stopgap funding measures.

Through all of this, the calls for modernization and upgrades continued even though no report or press release articulated exactly what those terms meant. Even worse, there was no discussion of how NextGen’s goals could be accomplished in a tenuous funding environment, which was not at all conducive to the needs of a multi-billion dollar risk-averse public-private partnership.

Revolving FAA administrators

FAA Administrator Marion Blakey, whose initial term began in 2002 (the George W. Bush Administration), left the agency for the private sector in 2007, and was followed by three administrators, two of them acting, until Michael Huerta was confirmed in January 2013 (the beginning of Obama’s second term). (Huerta also served as an acting administrator before his confirmation.) Acting Administrator Robert Sturgell had his permanent appointment blocked after a small number of senators claimed he was instrumental in policies that led to overwork and understaffing at ATC. (He was also blamed by one senator for airport noise, poor runway conditions, and flight delays.)

His successor, Lynne Osmus, was not considered for the permanent position, while her successor, Randy Babbit, resigned after being charged with drunk driving. (Those charges were later dismissed.)

Through this management upheaval, work on NextGen soldiered on but the issues with funding and leadership such a complex set of plans are key in understanding why it, much like every ATC upgrade program that preceded it, became bogged down in cost overruns and confusion.

NextGen’s primary goal was Trajectory-Based Operations (TBO), which entails highly efficient flight management from departure to arrival. This “air traffic management concept” has been articulated in one form or another since the FAA’s earliest days and relies on automation to compute the most direct, seamless path for each flight from start to finish.

Systems and technologies need to work flawlessly

But for TBO to work, a panoply of other systems and technologies must exist and flawlessly function. They can be found in a litany of acronyms that accompany descriptions of NextGen, including ADS-B, TFMS, ERAM, STARS, SWIM, and ATOP.

There is also Data Comm, which facilitates information flow, Performance Based Navigation, which makes sure an aircraft is where it is supposed to be, and Time Based Flow Management, which brings aircraft into the flow of traffic at just the precise moment so traffic streams can be endlessly executed.

To one degree or another, all of this comprised NextGen, and also, to one degree or another, all of it saw advances in development and execution. (Some have been fully deployed.) But because certain aspects of NextGen advanced more than others, it is difficult for casual observers to create a complete picture of where the strengths versus the flaws lay in the system, and because it isn’t all working as promised back in 2003, NextGen has been deemed a decisive political failure. A large part of the blame for that pessimistic determination lies in what happened before with the Advanced Automation System (AAS).

Advanced Automation’s failure

AAS was the previous long-term plan to modernize ATC. Established in the wake of the 1981 air traffic controllers’ strike, it was initially projected to cost $2.5bn and to be completed in 1996. It was shut down by FAA Administrator David Hinson in 1994 (The Clinton Administration) after costs tripled and many aspects of the plan remained incomplete.

The FAA blamed IBM, which won the competition over Hughes Aircraft to replace the existing system, for failing to produce working software. Meanwhile, IBM blamed the FAA for issuing a seemingly endless supply of change orders. (In 1990 alone, there were more than 500, necessitating the rewrite of over 150,000 lines of code.)

FAA Administrator Thomas Richards, who served in the position for seven months at the end of George Bush Sr.’s presidency, later noted to the New York Times that while he knew the project was not working, he was not in the position long enough to fix it.

Hinson authorized a “slimmed-down plan” with more achievable goals after closing AAS and noted that part of the problem was that it called for consolidating controllers from 254 existing TRACONs (Terminal Radar Approach Controls) into about 20 large centers.

This, however, proved as politically possible as closing a military base; it wasn’t going to happen. The TRACON closure plan, after four years and hundreds of millions of dollars in research, was dropped. Hinson’s smaller plan called for using newly available hardware and software to perform the work of existing equipment, thus sparing the agency the need to modernize beyond current capabilities. His successor, Jane Garvey, characterized it as “build a little; test a little; deploy a little.”

Relying on 1960s programming

In 2000, the New York Times published a comprehensive report on national flight delays and cancellations that looked at the fallout from terminating AAS. It found that Hinson’s revised plan was not succeeding, partly because the FAA could not purchase new mainframe computers due to the agency’s reliance on Jovial, a 1960s programming language dating back to a long-ago contract with the Strategic Air Command.

New computers did not “speak” Jovial. As to why antiquated computer language was still present in the ATC’s systems, the answer lies somewhere in the fallout over the Kennedy Administration’s commitment to the Cold War space race, rather than fund ATC modernization, and the Johnson Administration’s refusal to fund ATC due to rising costs of the Vietnam War. (Johnson instead told the agency to maintain the country’s “enviable record of air safety” with its current equipment.)

To cope with air congestion during that period, the FAA insisted that controllers work longer hours and that airports limit traffic. These measures will appear strikingly familiar to anyone who has followed commercial aviation’s travails this year.

The National Civil Aviation Review Commission, a blue-ribbon panel set up by Congress in 1996 (the Clinton Administration) to review AAS, concluded the FAA lacked “the organizational, management, and financial wherewithal to keep pace with the dynamic aviation community.”

Four years later, DOT OIG Kenneth Mead succinctly declared that the agency didn’t know what it needed. In September of this year, the OIG’s final report on NextGen said it suffered due to the agency’s “lack of realistic plans, budgets, and expectations or clearly identified benefits for stakeholders.”

The root problems remain unknown

The root of these common problems, which have persisted across the FAA’s 65-year history, remains unknown. Upgrade plans are made, and upgrade plans fail. While increased automation is perennially touted as necessary for success, it is the overworked air traffic controllers, technicians, and other FAA employees who keep the system functioning.

Immediately after the Jan. 29, 2025, midair collision of a US Army Black Hawk and American Airlines flight 5342 in Washington (DC), President Trump and Duffy blamed air traffic controllers. In the days that followed, the national conversation devolved into unfounded accusations surrounding diverse controller hiring and assertions that obsolete ATC equipment caused the crash.

As the investigation unfolded, however, it was discovered that a regulatory loophole approved by Congress in 2018 permitted the military to avoid using ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast) in the crowded Washington (DC) airspace. A month after the accident, US Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said there was “no compelling national security reason for ADS-B to be turned off.” Cruz, along with Duffy, who was a congressman in 2018, voted for the legislation permitting the loophole. President Trump, then in his first term, signed the legislation. Cruz and Duffy have since championed this year’s ROTOR Act, which will close the loophole.

A good thing out of NextGen

What no one has mentioned in all the very public discourse surrounding the crash is that widespread use of ADS-B is a product of NextGen.

This would especially be news to FAA Administrator Bedford, who told the US Chamber Global Aerospace Summit in September that “Many people think of modernization as another NextGen, and when we think about NextGen, we don’t think that worked out too well.”

Hopefully, he will spend some time studying what NextGen accomplished and, more importantly, how those responsible for getting it done allowed the mission to fail.