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A lack of funds is hampering the Trump administration’s effort to build a “brand new” air traffic control system, forcing the Federal Aviation Administration to carefully select which aspects of the nation’s aging ATC system to fully replace and which ones to simply upgrade or refresh.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy for weeks has said that fully replacing the national airspace system’s software infrastructure — which currently relies on three separate protocols — with a single “common automation platform” would be a central tenet of the administration’s modernization plan. Yet even with a record single-year injection of $12.5 billion from Congress in May, Federal Aviation Administration chief Bryan Bedford said the agency does not currently have the money to build an entirely new software system, according to a recording of an FAA town hall held earlier this month that was reviewed by The Air Current.
Bedford instead outlined a possible alternative to develop software that would better link the existing three platforms rather than replacing them entirely. Though Duffy and Bedford have both said that more money will be needed to accomplish the full ATC modernization plan, the acknowledgement that the system may not be all-new is a shift for the administration that has repeatedly claimed it will be able to fully replace many aspects of the nation’s ATC system in just three to four years.
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