How to Really Fix Air-Traffic Control
The ongoing crisis at Newark Liberty International Airport has laid bare the sorry state of our nation’s air-traffic-control system. Equipment outages have left air-traffic controllers unable to track or communicate with planes for multiple 30-to-90-second intervals. Some controllers have had to take leave to recover from the trauma, exacerbating a staff shortage and forcing the Federal Aviation Administration to further curb flights at Newark.
The Newark crisis comes soon after January’s deadly midair collision over Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, in which air-traffic control may have been a factor. In 2023, a malfunction of the FAA’s safety-notification system for pilots forced the agency to ground all flights nationwide for the first time since 9/11. A post-COVID surge in near collisions due in part to controller shortages and the dearth of preventive technology on airport runways raised even greater alarms.
A high-level safety panel convened in response to the string of near collisions painted a dire picture of deteriorating ATC facilities and legacy ATC systems, many of which are so old that the FAA can no longer obtain spare parts.
The Trump administration has doubled down on Biden administration efforts to attract and retain controllers. And Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, a former representative from Wisconsin and reality-TV star, recently called for investing tens of billions of dollars (the exact cost is unclear) to build a “brand new air traffic control system” over the next three years. At an April 8 press conference in which President Donald Trump participated by phone, Duffy—surrounded by a phalanx of airline CEOs, union leaders, and trade-association executives—urged Congress to fully fund the project up front and to streamline permitting requirements to accelerate construction of new facilities.
To be sure, throwing money at the problem has some merit, given the dire condition of the ATC system. The FAA’s capital budget has gone down both in real terms and as a share of agency spending over the past 20 years, as the cost of operating a creaky ATC system has consumed ever more resources. Moreover, according to congressional testimony from Paul Rinaldi, the former head of the air-traffic-controllers union, fully 92 percent of the FAA capital budget is devoted to maintaining legacy systems rather than funding new technology.
However, the Trump/Duffy proposal is flawed in a host of ways, the most egregious of which is that it preserves the current ATC-governance structure. Blue-ribbon commissions and independent experts have long argued that this structure is the underlying source of our nation’s ATC problems. Simply stated, air-traffic control is a 24/7 high-tech operation trapped inside a regulatory agency. The FAA is bound by stultifying federal rules and sees Congress, not the traveling public, as its customer.
Air-traffic control is not inherently a governmental function. Keeping planes safely separated is a complex but purely operational process that follows well-established rules. Like running an airline or manufacturing a commercial aircraft, air-traffic control can be performed by a nongovernmental entity as long as it is overseen by safety regulators—which perform a function that is inherently governmental. The most compelling evidence of this is that most developed countries have now “corporatized” their ATC provider.
Precisely because of the operational nature of air-traffic control, in fact, the federal government is poorly suited to run the system. Budget rules, for example, require federal agencies to pay for capital investments up front, out of current appropriations. These rules bar the FAA from financing large investments over time, as a normal business would. The resulting slow pace of FAA technology deployment means that new ATC systems might be obsolete by the time they are fully fielded. The FAA procurement culture is another constraint. Companies with transformational technologies struggle to gain traction in a stifling environment dominated by defense contractors and incentives for bespoke rather than off-the-shelf solutions.
The FAA also suffers from political interference. The agency must maintain costly legacy systems in part to accommodate powerful users whose aircraft are not equipped to operate updated technology. And individual members of Congress routinely prevent the FAA from closing facilities it no longer needs—at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars a year—and opening new ones it does need. Recently, Oklahoma lawmakers blocked legislation to authorize a second training academy for controllers for fear that it would pose a threat to the existing academy in Oklahoma City.
Most important, the current governance arrangement jeopardizes safety, because the FAA both operates and regulates the air-traffic-control system. This is a clear conflict of interest, and one that the International Civil Aviation Organization has directed member countries to eliminate.
Despite broad agreement on the problem, efforts to take air-traffic control out of the FAA so that it can operate like a public utility have repeatedly failed. In 2018, despite strong support from the Trump administration, the House of Representatives declined to take up legislation approved by the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee that would have moved the ATC system to a self-supporting nonprofit corporation, leaving the FAA as an independent safety regulator. In 1995, the Clinton administration similarly tried and failed to transfer ATC to a nonprofit government corporation.
The Clinton administration’s 1995 bill to corporatize ATC was dead on arrival in Congress primarily because of pushback from private pilots and corporate-jet owners, who pay almost nothing to use the ATC system. The same dynamic played out in 2018. In addition to protecting private pilots, the House bill preserved the fee structure that shifts $1 billion or more a year in costs from one-percenters in their $65 million Gulfstreams to the crowded passengers in coach. Skeptical that such largesse would continue under a privatized system, the corporate-jet trade association, flying under the cover of the much larger private-pilot lobby, persuaded Congress to keep air-traffic control stuck in the previous century.
The rest of the world moved in a very different direction. Whereas in 1995 only four countries had separated ATC from the aviation-safety regulator, now more than 60 have done so—typically by creating an independent government corporation or other nonprofit provider. The Canadian ATC provider Nav Canada, the model for the 2018 House bill, is handling significantly more traffic with a smaller staff than in 1996. It beats the FAA on unit costs despite its smaller scale. Scott McCartney, who wrote The Wall Street Journal’s long-running “Middle Seat” column, observed in 2016 that flying south over the U.S.-Canadian border “is like time travel for pilots”—you “leave a modern air-traffic control system run by a company and enter one run by the government struggling to catch up.”
As regrettable as it is, the crisis facing our nation’s ATC system gives the Trump administration political leverage. The current proposal squanders that leverage, promising the aviation sector tens of billions of taxpayer dollars with no accompanying reform of the deeply flawed ATC-governance structure—reform that would have the support of all but a few of the aviation leaders that surrounded Duffy on April 8. In the end, the promise of a sizable investment in ATC may be necessary to get a political deal. But without the quid pro quo of structural reform, more funding won’t solve the underlying crisis.