Time Is Running Out for the U.S. Air-Traffic Control System
Ensuring safety requires bringing both technology and the business model into the 21st century.
By Robert Poole
May 9, 2025 3:55 pm ET
Surrounded by airline CEOs and other aviation executives, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on Thursday announced his plan to bring about a new air-traffic control system over the next three to four years. He’s asking Congress to provide billions of dollars—though he didn’t specify the total amount—to pay for it.
America’s ATC system needs repairing. Most of the technology listed in Mr. Duffy’s plan should be replaced. But shoveling billions into a failed procurement system won’t fix the problem. Our ATC system lags behind those of other countries in many respects, including in technological advancement and productivity.
The Federal Aviation Administration’s budget for facilities and equipment—a substantial portion of which goes to air-traffic control—has stayed roughly flat in nominal terms over the past decade, while the operations budget has soared. The 21 high-altitude air route traffic control centers, more than 100 approach control centers, and many hundreds of airport control towers are antiquated, and most need to be replaced.
But with today’s digital surveillance technology, air traffic in our skies can be managed from almost anywhere. We need perhaps three rather than 21 high-altitude centers. One would do the trick, in fact, but three would ensure backup options in case of failure. This large-scale consolidation should be financed by long-term revenue bonds based on ATC user fees, which are paid by airlines and other airspace users to the ATC service provider. A pipe dream? Australia, Germany, South Africa and the U.K. have all done such consolidations in recent decades.
A single digital remote tower can manage many smaller control towers, at lower cost and higher productivity. While these systems are expanding throughout Europe, the FAA has resisted this breakthrough innovation.
America’s ATC system employs a significant amount of outdated technology for which no replacement parts exist, partly because the FAA often waits until a unit fails before trying to repair or replace it. Well-managed, well-funded ATC systems in Australia, Canada, Germany and the U.K. are able to plan large-scale technology replacements before systems begin breaking down. Many ATC providers buy replacement systems in bulk and roll them out to all facilities over a year or two. By contrast, the FAA in some cases takes 10 to 15 years to install replacement systems, by which time the systems may already be obsolete.
These are only a few examples of how badly funded and poorly managed America’s ATC system is. A one-time multibillion-dollar infusion won’t fix a broken procurement process. It could also undermine the modernization effort by botching the procurement of new systems. A much wiser policy would be to replace the business model.
The reason many other countries’ ATC systems work far better than ours is that their business models have changed, from a tax-funded bureaucracy embedded in a transportation ministry into a public utility funded by customer user fees. Such a model enables the board and top management of the utility to do long-range planning and to finance both technology upgrades and facility consolidations based on a predictable revenue stream. This also changes airlines and airspace users from supplicants before Congress to stakeholder customers demanding high-caliber performance.
Several ATC public-utility models are in operation around the world. The most common model is a government-owned public utility, as in Australia, New Zealand, Germany and much of the rest of Europe. America’s Tennessee Valley Authority is an analogous example, funded by customers’ electric bills and financed via long-term revenue bonds. Italy and the U.K. provide air-traffic control via public-private partnerships—partly state-owned and partly investor-owned companies. The highly successful Nav Canada, the world’s second-largest ATC provider in terms of annual transactions, uses a nonprofit user cooperative model.
How out of step is the U.S.? The latest figures from the Civil Air Navigation Services Organization find that there are four nongovernment providers, 63 government-owned utilities and four intergovernmental ATC utilities serving multiple countries in Africa, Central America, and Northern Europe. Adding them all up, 98 countries today have ATC services via user-funded public utilities.
Nearly all countries served by ATC companies have also separated the provision of ATC services from aviation safety regulation. The National Transportation Safety Board, as well as many former FAA and Transportation Department officials, have called for such separation in the U.S. This has been the policy of the International Civil Aviation Organization since 2001, and the U.S. is one of the few outliers. An initial reform step would be to separate our Air Traffic Organization from the FAA, at last putting the two at arm’s length.
On June 5, 2017, President Trump held an event in support of House Transportation Committee Chairman Bill Shuster’s ATC corporation bill, which proposed a nonprofit public utility similar to Nav Canada. He later focused on other infrastructure reforms, and that bill failed. Today, the best champion of ATC reform is Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, chairman of the Commerce Committee.
During the first Trump term, many airline executives supported this kind of reform; today, they seem to favor a one-time infusion of tax money. But the ATC system’s dire shape is far more visible today than it was in 2017. It took a tragic midair collision between two airliners over the Grand Canyon in 1956 to bring about nationwide radar surveillance of air traffic. Let’s hope that only one 2025 midair collision suffices to bring about meaningful ATC reform.
Mr. Poole is director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation.
