Ancient US air traffic control systems won't get a tech refresh before 2030

Updated The Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) air traffic control (ATC) systems are perilously out of date, but don't expect replacements anytime soon, says the US Government Accountability Office (GAO).

In a report released Monday, the GAO said that 51 of the FAA's 138 ATC systems – more than a third – were unsustainable due to a lack of parts, shortfalls in funding to sustain them, or a lack of technology refresh funding to replace them. A further 54 systems were described as "potentially unsustainable" for similar reasons, with the added caveat that tech refresh funding was available to them.

"FAA has 64 ongoing investments aimed at modernizing 90 of the 105 unsustainable and potentially unsustainable systems," the GAO said in its report. "However, the agency has been slow to modernize the most critical and at-risk systems."

The report said the seemingly perilous status of 17 systems was "especially concerning" as these are deemed to have critical operational impact at the same time as being unsustainable and having extended completion dates – the first of them won't be modernized until 2030 at the earliest. Others aren't planned to be complete until 2035, and four of the 17 "most critical and at-risk FAA ATC systems" have no modernization plans at all.

Of the systems on the list, two are more than 40 years old, and a further seven have been in service for more than 30 years.

FAA not A-OK

Yesterday's GAO report was written in response to the grounding of all US departures in January 2023 after the FAA's Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system went offline because someone accidentally deleted some critical files.

While that might have been user error, it was the GAO's opportunity to again assess the FAA's ATC modernization efforts, which it says have been dismally behind and poorly managed for decades.

"For over four decades we have reported on challenges facing FAA's modernization of its air traffic control systems," the GAO said. "In February 1982, FAA released its first comprehensive plan for improving air traffic control services. As we subsequently reported in several products, FAA faced challenges with this modernization."

In short, this isn't a new problem for the FAA – it even admitted to needing until the 2030s to modernize the NOTAM system after the 2023 outage.

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As for the cause of these delays, the FAA lacks organization when it comes to tracking such projects, especially the new ones.

According to the report, the FAA's policies don't require much oversight of projects that have yet to present a baseline for cost, schedule, and performance. That's led to projects taking an average of more than four years to establish baselines, meaning nothing concrete is getting done in the meantime.

In addition – and perhaps most critically – the FAA's Joint Resources Council, the body that oversees investments and projects, hasn't been ensuring that ATC projects "deliver functionality in manageable segments," hasn't consistently monitored high-risk items in its various projects, and has been sloppy in next-phase approval of projects, reviewing only "some, but not all, required documentation prior to approving."

In short, the GAO said the FAA's reliance on unsustainable systems is introducing a ton of risk to aviation safety, and poor record keeping has meant that Congress doesn't have the knowledge it needs to effectively oversee its ATC modernization efforts.

The GAO wants the FAA to implement seven recommendations, largely centered on reducing baseline time, increasing oversight, and ensuring Congress is fully informed of how the FAA is mitigating risks to ATC systems. The FAA generally concurred with the GAO's findings, save one item that it partially concurred with pending language changes.

Kevin Walsh, the GAO's director of IT and cybersecurity and an author on the report, told The Register that he thinks the recommendations are reasonable and "achievable with some good faith effort" on the FAA's part.

"[The FAA] also indicated plans to address some of the recommendations," Walsh added. "We [see] the agreement and early plans as good signs." 

We asked the FAA and elected officials responsible for oversight to comment. ®

Updated to add at 2100 UTC

The FAA has been in touch with its side of this story, which is largely that it sees eye to eye with the auditors. In a statement, the agency said it needs $8 billion to modernize its systems:

We're also told that in his testimony to the US House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure on Tuesday, FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker said: “The FAA facilities have been somewhat famously underinvested in over the years. We have 21 Centers that control high altitude aircraft, those were designed to be a maximum life at 50 years. They’re now on average between 60 and 70 years old.

"All these facilities need to be replaced and upgraded. It is a fairly heavy lift financially. We have requested $8 billion in next year's budget to begin working on some of that replacement.

"There’s a huge backlog of sustainment and modernization and right now 90 percent of our budget for facilities goes on sustainment rather than new systems, so we have a lot of work to bring the system up to speed.”