Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on Tuesday that the Trump administration plans to rebuild the entire airspace infrastructure with bipartisan support, in order to address the “burning issues” affecting it.
Duffy outlined a series of both short- and long-term initiatives for this.
One of the long term initiatives includes building a new Air Traffic Control system. A short-term project is laying new fiber to fix the issues that have plagued Newark International Airport for the past week.
The fiber will be installed at Philadelphia International Airport, which is the Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) for four states, including New Jersey.
No one should be “surprised” by what’s happening in Newark, Duffy told Newsmax host Greta Van Susteren.
“This has been a burning issue over the course of the last decade, but specifically over the last four years," he said. "We saw what happened in New York. That could happen in other places around the infrastructure. So we are going to build a brand new air traffic control system; that's going to take anywhere from three to four years. [I]n the Philly TRACON, which controls Newark, we're already up there. We had a primary line that went down and the secondary line, the redundant line, it didn't stand up. So we're working on fixing that and making sure both lines, the primary and the redundant line, are working. But at the same time we're laying new fiber in the Philly TRACON to make sure we can stand up the telecom to make sure it never goes down again.”
Duffy believes that new fiber can be installed by the summer. However, there is also a shortage of 3,000 air traffic controllers.
“[W]e're going to deal with what's happening by trying to stand up more controllers in the Philly TRACON. We're going to get airlines together to talk about how they can reduce capacity at Newark. So if you go to the airport, you're not going to be delayed for four hours. You're not going to be canceled,” Duffy said.
Getting funding from Congress is “going to be bipartisan; everyone agrees we have to do this,” Duffy said. “Here's the problem: Prior Congresses have given small tranches of money to the FAA, and there hasn't been big, bold vision to build something brand new. We're going to ask the Congress for all the money up front. We're going to get the money. And again, we’re gonna get new radars, new radios, sensors on tarmacs, new infrastructure around telecom, going from copper to fiber. All the things that make an air traffic control system great, we're actually going to implement here.”