U.S. air traffic control is antiquated. They’ve done a terrible job managing technology upgrades for several decades. Airspace is congested in the Northeast, so many processes are manual, and they don’t have enough people to manage the manual process. There are solutions, but those mostly get reject (like remote towers).
Credit where due, they’re moving control of Newark airport from Long Island to Philadelphia – but that’s just a workaround for an intransigent work group at the New York TRACON N90 facility, which keeps rejecting new controllers to preserve overtime.
Unlike in much of the world, the federal government doesn’t just regulate air traffic control it performs the service itself. That means they regulate themselves. And they do a bad job of it. Plus, they’re captive to annual congressional appropriations cycles which makes capital investment difficult.
Thought that the nationwide ground stop a year and a half ago – the first one since 9/11 – was bad when the FAA’s NOTAM system failed? They are still using paper flight strips. They’ve been trying to go electronic since 1983. And they won’t get most of the way even this decade, as transportation researcher Bob Poole notes:
On July 17, the Department of Transportation Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a report on the slow progress of FAA’s program to equip U.S. airport control towers with electronic flight strips (to replace traditional paper flight strips physically handed from one controller to another). The bad news is that instead of only 89 towers scheduled to receive this improvement by 2028, there will now be only 49 towers equipped by 2029.
Wait until you explain paper flight strips!https://t.co/fyU7aSILWr pic.twitter.com/gOBIHME3oK
— gary leff (@garyleff) July 2, 2023
The FAA set out a plan in 1983 “to equip 150 to 250 airport control towers by 2000.” They went way over budget and didn’t accomplish much. Most recently, a “contract with Lockheed-Martin (now Leidos) was to equip 89 towers with TFDM by 2028.” That’s been scaled back to 49 towers, but “only 27 of them will get the full version that includes surface management functions, while the other 22 will get only the electronic flight strips.”
They’ve cut airports including Honolulu, New Orleans, San Juan, Anchorage, Burbank, Hartford, Ontario, Orange County and Sacramento among others.
Meanwhile, all of Nav Canada facilities went electronic 15 years ago (and all control towers and TRACONs even earlier). Their solution is used in Australia, Italy, the U.K. and Dubai. We could license the Canadian solution, or other commercial ones, but instead the FAA has been working contracting for their own solution since three years before the Beastie Boys were fighting for your right to party.