Posted on 03/06/2025 6:59:34 AM PST by Salman
Over a third of the USA’s air traffic control systems are in an “unsustainable" state, and the FAA's decades-long project to upgrade them is not going well.
That concerning situation was described on Tuesday by the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) in testimony to the House committee on transportation and infrastructure’s subcommittee on aviation.
The auditors at the GAO examined 138 ATC operations and found that 51 (37 percent) were considered "unsustainable" by the FAA and 54 (39 percent) were "potentially unsustainable."
The FAA deployed six of the ATC systems 60 years ago, and 40 are 30 years old. 72 have been in operation for over two decades. Spare parts are scarce, and trained personnel to maintain them are becoming harder to find.
"The FAA’s reliance on a large percentage of aging and unsustainable or potentially unsustainable collection of ATC systems introduces risks to the FAA's ability to ensure the safe, orderly, and expeditious flow of air traffic," said Heather Krause, the GAO's managing director of physical infrastructure, in testimony to US House reps.
...
(Excerpt) Read more at theregister.com ...
Trump's Fault!!!
IIRC there was a push 30 or so years ago to update the entire system. Still in work or waiting approval? Never happened?
Sort of like the Brandon admins plan to introduce EV chargers across the land.
It’s the best technology from the 1970’s!...................
IIRC with that crash in DC a few weeks ago it was said that the tower was understaffed at the time of the crash. I’ve seen it written that people who did air traffic control in the Air Force and Navy are being rejected for civilian jobs because they’re too “white bread”.
And Leon’s getting laaaarger!
Hah Hah!
I got in before one of us Freepers posted TRUMP’S FAUL-——
oh. NVM....
well played
DEI did that.
Elon Musk is offering to provide the hardware to do the test of his system.
Verizon may lose this one.
Wasn’t Next Gen supposed to be the upgrade and replacement?
For decades Money allocated went out the back door as we have seen in the last few weeks since trump came in and DODE was on it. They care about the American people so much that they steal our tax dollars and put our families in danger
I knew some people who were working on it, there is a testing center in Atlantic City where they were working. Chatting with them, it was pretty much incremental improvements to a really old system. Safety requirements slow everything down and the more you change the harder/longer it becomes. So small changes over time. I guess that plan didn’t work out so well, probably resulted in lots of spaghetti code that can’t easily be worked on.
I hope you are not casting dispersion upon PDP-8s and PDP-11s. Do make me come over there.
PDP-11s were where I first played ‘Star Trek’ on a computer!......................
The Motorola 68000 was actualy a superset of them, mostly.
From my professional experience the FAA is very averse to technology updates, maybe even phobic. They go with what has worked so far. When I worked on a contract for them, they were wedded to IBM and were still running and maintaining big iron mainframes. Even then, twenty-five years ago, parts and maintenance and skilled personnel were becoming a problem. Young engineers and sys admins and techies didn’t want to work with that HW and SW as they saw no professional future in it.
There was an RFP in the late eighties for the job of a total update of the National ATC system. My company submitted a bid IBM won the contract. I think it being so large and unwieldy (the job I mean) it was later broken into smaller projects and parceled out. The end result? IDK…
One good thing, the FAA always errs on the side of caution. OTOH, they take that to such an extreme that it is sometimes impossible to implement positive change.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.