AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
U.S. air traffic control system is showing its age. Many of its critical systems are decades old, and some are starting to fail. We saw that during the radar and communication outages that led to hundreds of delays and cancellations at the airport in Newark, New Jersey, one of the country's busiest. That's prompting transportation secretary Sean Duffy to push for an overhaul.
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SEAN DUFFY: This is the most important infrastructure project that we've had in this country for decades. Everyone agrees this is nonpartisan. Everyone knows we have to do it.
RASCOE: But upgrading the technology that manages U.S. airspace, the busiest in the world, won't be cheap or easy. NPR's Joel Rose has been following all this, and he joins us now. Good morning.
JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: Hi.
RASCOE: Just how outdated is the current system?
ROSE: Yeah. It relies on technology that has been around, in some cases, since the middle of the 20th century. Some of the computer systems date back to the 1980s and '90s. They are still dependent, in some cases, on floppy disks and running Windows 95. I want to emphasize, the system is safe. All the stakeholders agree on that, but it is not as efficient as it could be. And some of these older systems are starting to fail. That's part of what we saw in Newark. But Newark is not the exception as far as this aging technology. This is really the rule across much of the system.
RASCOE: So why haven't we been able to retire the floppy disk and Windows 95 computers?
ROSE: The biggest problem is money. The Federal Aviation Administration has seen decades of underinvestment in its equipment budget, but it is more complicated than that. Even when the FAA has had the money to spend, it has still failed to modernize the system, and part of that is even when the agency does roll out a new technology, it has sometimes been forced to keep older systems online. I talked to Michael Huerta about this. He's a former FAA administrator under President Obama, and Huerta also chaired a safety review panel that looked at air traffic control two years ago.
MICHAEL HUERTA: The FAA's been asked to do more with less, essentially. We deploy new technologies, but we have a hard time decommissioning old stuff.
ROSE: Another big obstacle is that the air traffic control system as a whole is organized around these older technologies. Nationwide, there are more than 20 centers that handle high-altitude traffic. They are old. Many of them are falling apart. Huerta says, we probably don't need them all, and yet consolidation will be politically very difficult because members of Congress are likely to fight to protect these facilities and jobs that are in their districts.
RASCOE: What are some possible solutions, and how realistic are they?
ROSE: Well, the Trump administration is dreaming big. Transportation Secretary Duffy is pushing for a brand new air traffic control system and wants Congress to put up the money up front. Duffy has not said, though, how much this will cost. He estimates it's into the tens of billions of dollars, and he believes it can be done in four years. Still, there are a lot of questions about how this will look. Last week, the Trump administration put out a call for what it's calling an integrator to manage construction of this new system. I talked to David Grizzle about that. He is a former chief operating officer at the FAA.
DAVID GRIZZLE: It's an extraordinarily ambitious plan. It is inconceivable that it could all be done within four years. But if you could merely start, that would be a tremendous achievement.
ROSE: These former FAA officials say it has taken us decades to get into this situation, and it's likely to take a long time to get out of it, as well.
RASCOE: That's NPR's Joel Rose. Thank you so much.
ROSE: You're welcome.
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