Transportation secretary calls on Congress to fund new air traffic control system

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on Wednesday said his department is developing a state-of-the-art air traffic control system to replace the current program, which hasn’t been updated since the 1980s.

“Mr. President, [there are] band-aid fixes that have happened over the course of 20 years. You can’t have a band-aid fix. It doesn’t get done,” Mr. Duffy said during a Cabinet meeting before he called on Congress to fund the project.

Mr. Duffy highlighted the safety issues related to having working equipment, referencing the deadly aviation collision between an American Airlines passenger jet and a Black Hawk military helicopter over the Potomac River in January.

“Our system is safe, but you would have hoped someone would have seen that there’s a problem with fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters coming in at [Reagan National Airport],” Mr. Duffy said. “Someone should have seen that before we lost almost 70 lives.”

He added that the system “has to be brand new. The technology, it looks like it’s out of a 1980s movie, old computers, floppy disks. We’re using copper wires, not fiber. So there are … great solutions we have available.”

He continued, “Everyone’s sick of their delayed flights or their canceled flights; we have more capacity in the airspace. And if we build this brand new system, you’ll have more efficiency in the airspace.”

President Trump agreed, saying the system should be built and that the previous administration wasted money hooking up old equipment not compatible with new equipment.

 “We have no choice, and we do it and be very proud of it. They did old equipment into new equipment, and you can’t hook in old equipment to new equipment,” Mr. Trump said. “Because it’s a different. Some are satellite and some is ground. … You can’t hook up a satellite system to a ground-wired system.”

The president noted that “hundreds” of contractors were “fighting with each other.” He wants one contractor to build the new air traffic control system when Congress funds it.