Sean Duffy (speech): “We are making promises and we are keeping our promises to the American people delivering on our brand new air traffic control system. Last week, as part of this modernization effort, we announced a new program called smart that’s going to help us better manage weather and help, better manage our flights, giving different tools to be predictive in what we not just see at this moment, but what we see in the future, because we want to deliver better for the American people, reduce their delays and reduce their cancellations.”
Sean Duffy (speech): “But as we look forward, I think the American people want the job completed. They want us to finish what we’ve started and to finish what we start started. We need more money. And I would just tell you before I lay out the ask for $30 billion, this is probably the most bipartisan effort in Washington, DC. This town fights about everything. There’s nothing that Washington agrees on. But they do agree on aviation. They do agree that they want to deliver a better experience for the American people. And I think on a bipartisan effort, Democrats and Republicans would agree that we’re actually delivering on the promises that we’ve made.”
Sean Duffy (speech): “So let’s talk about the $30 billion. So we’ve divvied the 30 billion into three tranches, ten, ten, and ten. So the first, $10 billion is, we want to replace our underlying architecture in telecom. So our architecture is a 1980’s architecture. We have redundant lines that go through a single point of failure.”
Sean Duffy (speech): “The second $10 billion is for airport infrastructure. So, a lot of our towers, many of them were built in the 1960’s and 70’s, now we built really well in the 60’s and 70’s, but they’re getting old, and we have air traffic controllers who are working in towers where the roofs leak.”
Sean Duffy (speech): “And then the third $10 billion is for our airports. So, if you have a large airport, it’s easier for those airports to go to private capital. It’s easier for them to bond their project, and it’s easier for them to self-fund. It’s our midsize airports that are having a difficult time accessing capital to upgrade their airports. And I think we should have the greatest, most beautiful state-of-the-art airports in the world.”
Sean Duffy (speech): “I’ll just ask the American people and the Congress. If you don’t want to do it now, when do you want to do it? When are we sick enough for the aviation experience, the travel experience when we go through airports? When are we sick enough of the delays and the cancellations and the infrastructure that we use that’s so old? When are we so tired of it that we say, ‘no, make the investment. We’re going to save money and save time if we take this leap of faith and let an FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) and DOT (Department of Transportation) that’s actually building, that’s actually meeting the promises that we’ve made. Let us do this.'”
Sean Duffy (speech): “I think it’s important for America to understand this is not the first time that the FAA has undertaken a modernization in aviation. About 30 years ago, there was an effort called the NextGen. And the Congress gave anywhere from $10-15 billion to this modernization called NextGen. And, the deliverable on NextGen was virtually nothing. A lot of money was spent, a lot of promises were made, but not a lot was delivered on behalf of the American people. And so, as we’ve gone to Congress and asked for money, the Congress has been a little bit reticent to believe that we can do what we say we’re going to do. But the Congress did put faith in us about a year and a half ago where they gave us $12.5 billion.”
This script was provided by The Associated Press.