National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) President Nick Daniels said recent outages “underscore” the necessity to update the country’s air traffic control system.
“The key is making sure that the capacity of the system matches our capabilities and right now, while we continue to have these outages, it just underscores the need for an investment in the modernization of the air traffic system,” Daniels told FOX Business’ Grady Trimble.
The country’s air traffic control system, contending with staffing shortages, outdated technology and underinvestment in critical infrastructure for years, has been in the spotlight in recent weeks as Newark Liberty International Airport has experienced several brief communications outages.
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“We didn’t get here overnight,” Daniels said. “We’re not going to get out of here overnight, but partnering with this administration to make the investment that’s needed now will actually start providing the solutions that the American people deserve and that they’re looking for.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy unveiled plans earlier in the month that his department said would extensively revamp the ATC system into one that is “state-of-the-art” through the replacement of radar, software, hardware and telecommunications infrastructure.
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The NATCA, which represents nearly 20,000 air traffic controllers, engineers and other aviation safety workers, has expressed its support for the Transportation Department’s proposed overhaul of the system over the next few years.
Daniels told Trimble that three to four years was a “realistic solution.”
President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget bill has provisions allocating $12.5 billion to hire more air traffic controllers and to modernize the system’s technology, Trimble reported.
The president paid a visit to Capitol Hill on Tuesday morning to sit down with lawmakers about the bill.
Asked by Trimble what he would say to lawmakers about Duffy’s plan, Daniels said the “time for action is now.”
“The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee put up a #12.5 billion investment in the system that is a great start,” he told Trimble. “The issues have been with Congress of the stop-and-go funding that the FAA has done historically. The FAA has not received or asked for the amount of money that they need. And then when they go to fix something, or they go to implement new systems, they only implement 10 to 30 of them because that’s all the investment they had for that day.”
He said a large investment “all at one time” will “let us fix the infrastructure, bring forward the change we need, and then hire the air traffic controllers to do this job.”
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Daniels also assured people that flying is safe.
“I’d fly in and out of every airport that any air traffic controller that we represent works at,” he told Trimble. “The system is safe because of the hard working men and women of this nation. They go to work under one of the most stressful jobs in the entire world.”
Daniella Genovese contributed to this report.
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