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U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy called on Congress to spend another $30 billion to upgrade the nation’s aging air traffic control system and airports.
Duffy said decades-old technology was contributing to flight disruptions and that the nation’s system could struggle to keep up with increasing air travel.
At a news conference at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Duffy said the money would build on the $12.5 billion Congress previously approved for the Federal Aviation Administration to modernize the nation’s air traffic control system.
He had originally estimated the upgrades would cost about $30 billion in total. “If you don’t want to do it now, when do you want to do it?” said Duffy.
“When are we sick enough of the delays and the cancellations and the infrastructure that we use that’s so old?”
Under the Modern Skies Act, the $30 billion would be divided into three major areas, Duffy said. “The first, $10 billion is, we want to replace our underlying architecture in telecom. So our architecture is a 1980s architecture. We have redundant lines that go through a single point of failure,” he said. “The second $10 billion is for airport infrastructure,” Duffy said, adding the third $10 billion would go to airports.
It comes just a week after a telecommunications glitch at a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) facility in Philadelphia disrupted thousands of flights across the Northeast.
A primary communications line failed, and a backup fiber-optic line was accidentally severed, leading to ground stops, widespread delays and cancellations at airports including Newark, Philadelphia and New York’s LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy International airports.
The announcement also comes a year-and-a-half after the deadly midair collision at Reagan National Airport in January 2025 between an American Airlines passenger jet and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter.
The crash killed all 67 people aboard the two aircraft: 64 passengers on the commercial flight and three soldiers in the helicopter.
In December 2025, the federal government admitted that failures by the Army helicopter pilots and a controller in the Reagan National Airport tower contributed to the deadly crash.
This article was provided by The Associated Press.