Flight cancellations and delays show dire state of US air traffic control

On Monday, the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA’s) Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) facility suffered a failure in an aging telecommunications circuit. Apparently unbeknownst to the agency, a backup fiberoptic line running in a railroad right-of-way had already been accidentally cut by a New Jersey Transit contractor. This loss of communications led the FAA to initiate ground stops at Philadelphia and New York area airports, causing over 1,000 flight cancellations, 6,000 delays, and negatively impacting tens of thousands of passengers.

This costly episode underscores the dire state of America’s air traffic control system.

The aging copper circuit that failed at Philadelphia TRACON had been slated for replacement under the Trump administration’s air traffic control modernization program. Congress has already allocated $12.5 billion to that effort, with telecommunications upgrades as a core focus. But the following day, at the Aero Club in Washington, D.C., Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy spoke of the need for tens of billions of dollars in additional air traffic control investment needs. Congress has so far demurred.

While Secretary Duffy is correct that additional investment in air traffic control modernization is badly needed, pouring more money into the same agencies and channels is unlikely to deliver better results. As we at Reason Foundation have long argued, the core problem is institutional design and management of the air traffic control system.

The FAA is responsible for both running air traffic control and regulating it. This dual role, where the same authority handles safety oversight and service provision, started in the United States many years ago and was copied in other countries. Decisions about investing in air traffic control depend on the priorities of lawmakers and federal transportation officials, who sometimes have different goals.

But by the 1980s, efforts to modernize air traffic control were running into problems around the world. In 1987, New Zealand became the first country in the world to separate air traffic control from its aviation safety regulator. It established a new government corporation that collected cost-based aviation user fees and made air traffic control investment decisions autonomously, all under arm’s-length safety oversight.

This model allows air navigation service providers to self-finance improvements and technological upgrades, and do so all at once by issuing revenue bonds backed by predictable user fee collections. Their capital investment programs are not subject to the budgeting or political whims of legislators and government bureaucrats.

Today, by Reason Foundation’s count, 96 countries, including most industrialized countries and a growing number of developing countries, have air traffic control provided by an air traffic control utility funded by user fees. Most of these are state-owned corporations, but a few are partially privatized or structured as nongovernmental user cooperatives, such as Nav Canada.

Countries that have transitioned to an air traffic control utility model have been able to adopt new technologies faster, such as fully replacing paper flight progress strips with digital alternatives, adopting space-based surveillance over oceanic and remote areas, and using remote/digital control towers that give controllers better visibility at lower cost. These technologies are mainstream or becoming so around the world, but FAA has yet to complete deployments of any of them—and in many cases, has yet to begin the upgrades that are years or decades behind.

To be sure, adopting the air traffic utility model is not a panacea for solving all potential problems. Good management and proper regulatory oversight remain important. But as longtime air traffic control executive John Kefaliotis put it in a recent Reason Foundation report, reforming governance enables the “transition from a tax-funded air traffic control system chronically short of adequate revenue and long-term financing to a sustainable, adaptable non-profit commercial structure capable of continuous modernization.”

In the U.S., the current plan is to upgrade facilities and equipment just once, with no strategy for future updates that will soon be necessary. Government watchdogs are already questioning whether the FAA’s upgrades will work, so the costly, yet limited and temporary benefits may never materialize.

Ultimately, in a state of “continuous modernization” is where we want the U.S. air navigation service provider to be, where air traffic control equipment is replaced on a regular schedule before it is completely obsolete, dilapidated and in need of a congressional bailout that may not arrive. Doubling down on the current FAA model, which is already expensive and decades behind on modernization projects, will not achieve that.

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