Aviation advocates are pushing Congress to modernize the nation’s air traffic control systems, blaming stagnant funding in part for the Federal Aviation Administration’s growing backlog of essential upgrades.
According to a government watchdog report, the FAA determined that 105 of the 138 systems were either unsustainable or potentially unsustainable. More than half of those — 58 systems, including elements of a long-delayed overhaul that would add more satellite and digital communications technology to overall operations — have “critical operational impacts” on the safety and efficiency of the national airspace.
Although the agency has programs aimed to modernize many of the 105 questionable systems, it has still been slow to address the most critical ones, the Government Accountability Office found in the report, released last month. Some modernization projects are estimated to take as many as 13 years to complete, and four systems lack the sustained funding needed to finish the job, it said.
When asked about the backlog in a September committee hearing, FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker said FAA facilities have been “somewhat famously underfunded” over the years. The agency is facing a $5.2 billion shortfall to merely sustain some operations, according to the White House budget.
“We have 21 centers that control high-altitude aircraft. Those were designed to be a maximum life of 50 years,” he told the House Transportation and Infrastructure Aviation Subcommittee. “They’re now on average between 60 and 70 years old. … It’s a fairly heavy lift financially.”
Twenty-seven industry and stakeholder groups in July urged lawmakers who appropriate and authorize FAA spending to adopt a White House proposal to shift $8 billion over five years toward improving the aging infrastructure.
This “Facility Replacement and Radar Modernization” proposal would use cash from the Airport and Airway Trust Fund, which is fed by a variety of excise taxes on airline passenger tickets, aviation fuel purchases, cargo and more. According to a Congressional Budget Office forecast, the fund’s revenues are expected to steadily increase over that time, with uncommitted balances projected to grow from $5.8 billion by the end of fiscal 2024 to $9.5 billion in fiscal 2030.
The groups pointed to the 2023 Notice to Air Missions system outage that caused 1,300 flight cancellations and 10,000 delays throughout the day. That system is over 30 years old.
“The effects of underinvestment in [facilities and equipment] are becoming strikingly clear,” the organizations said. “FAA switched to a ‘fix-on-fail’ model during [fiscal 2013’s] sequestration and has not returned to a model of preventative maintenance.”
But the budget is only part of the problem.
The GAO report found that the FAA had challenges managing the cost and schedules of some of the improvement programs, sometimes taking years to develop baselines for cost and performance. It also found that the agency’s oversight has not been up to par, noting that it has reported similar issues in the past.
The NextGen program — a multi-decade, multibillion-dollar undertaking to transform the nation’s air traffic control system to one that’s based on satellite navigation and digital communications — is a common example.
FAA released its initial plan for NextGen in 2004. Just last year, the agency had expected to complete it by 2025. But the final project won’t be done until at least 2030. An FAA Office of Inspector General report added that industry representatives working on NextGen told investigators that the agency’s transparency and collaboration with them have been declining since 2018.
The GAO previously found that some NextGen program delays were due to unanticipated events, but said in 2023 that FAA’s lack of a mitigation plan for such issues was an oversight.
Lawmakers included a provision in the FAA reauthorization bill that passed earlier this year requiring the FAA to close the NextGen office by the end of 2025 and transfer its tasks to other parts of the agency.
“The findings of this report are extremely concerning, if not surprising. Anyone who’s followed this over the years knows how broken the FAA’s efforts to modernize [air traffic control] systems have been, especially NextGen,” a House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee spokesperson, speaking on condition of anonymity, said of the recent GAO report. “The FAA Reauthorization Act took steps to stem the bleeding on poorly executed modernization efforts. … The Committee is continuing to review this report and will likely, schedule permitting, hold a hearing on its findings sometime this year.”
Christopher Rocheleau, COO at the National Business Aviation Association, said in an interview that the reauthorization bill and Whitaker’s leadership of the FAA are good signs for an overhaul of the agency’s modernization programs.
“Last year we had the NOTAM outage, and that got everybody’s attention,” he said. “The reauthorization in general really does give the administrator and the senior team at FAA the ability to take two or three steps forward.”
As for the additional funding, neither the House nor Senate fiscal 2025 funding bills for the Transportation Department include the White House’s $8 billion Facility Replacement and Radar Modernization proposal. But Rocheleau said he thinks there’s an appetite for it.
“We need to keep the pressure on the Congress, and we need to keep the pressure on the Department of Transportation and the FAA to … develop some momentum going forward,” he said.
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