Trumpadministrationen presenterar plan för att modernisera flygtrafikledning | NTD NYHETER

On May 8th, the Trump administration promised to modernize an aging system. A promise aimed at the families after the recent air accidents. President Trump took the lead over the phone. That's a lot. And building six new state-of-the-art air traffic control coordination centers, which is the top, that's the tippy top of what you do. And it's the first time that there's been anything like this since the 1960s. We have a lot of equipment that's from the 1960s, if you can believe it, and it doesn't even mesh with the plane. So we'll be purchasing 25,000 new radios and replacing hundreds of old radars. The radar systems are old and broken. And we'll install 4,000 new high-speed network connections using fiber-optic cables, satellites and wireless technologies. And we'll also install 174 new weather stations in Alaska. Alaska's prime time. So these actions will bring American air traffic control into the highest level of anybody, any country anywhere in the world, the highest in the 21st century. Transport Minister Sean Duffy said that the plan includes six new air traffic control centers, as well as upgrades of technology and communication systems. New hardware and software will be standardized in all air traffic control facilities. He showed participants examples of the equipment used today. Now if you might take a look at the stage here, we have a number of different, you might call them systems. I didn't, by the way, get this off the set of Apollo 13 or War Games. Remember those movies? You might think that I went to the Smithsonian and pulled them out of the Smithsonian to show you what they used to use for air traffic control. I didn't do any of that. This is actually the systems that our air traffic controllers use to keep our sky safe. It is old. It looks like it's out of the 70s and 80s. The House of Representatives for Transport and Infrastructure estimated last week that it could cost $12.5 billion to renew the entire system. Duffy said he can't do this alone and urged Congress to take responsibility and contribute. So, to do it in three or four years, we need all of the money up front, right? One of the problems of the past is when you give small tranches of money year over year, politics change, leadership changes, presidents change, interest changes, and it never gets built. So, I'm going to ask the Congress for upfront appropriations to give us all the money. I'll come before the Congress every quarter and give them an update of how far we've built, how much money we've spent. They can pressure test what's been done to do the oversight to make sure we're doing this correctly. But on top of that, we also need permitting reform. Some form of clearing the deck so we don't have to deal with all of the regulation around permitting so we can actually build this quickly. If we go through the permitting process and don't get the money, this is going to be the same old thing. Today's announcement, I believe, is a major step in reversing the deterioration of safety in the U.S. airspace. As chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, I will work to give the Department of Transportation the resources needed to improve today's infrastructure, to improve the technology you see in front of us, and to make sure that we're doing the right thing. Much of which seems like it was assembled at a radio shack 50 years ago. But all of us know that money alone isn't a cure for all that ails the FAA. We need to ensure that there is a committed long-term focus to fixing and upgrading technology, to streamlining and simplifying procurement, to bolstering the workforce, and to making it easier and safer to bring new tech, whether delivery drones or air taxis, into the U.S. airspace system. Arlene Richards, NTD News.