Elon Musk’s team at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is going to work with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to give the country’s air traffic control (ATC) systems an upgrade, according to a series of posts to X on Wednesday.
The two agencies will work together to make “rapid safety upgrades” to ATC systems, Musk said in a post on his social media platform X.
The announcement comes just days after the FAA announced a temporary outage of its aviation warning system for pilots on Saturday. It’s worth noting that this warning system, known as the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system, is separate from the in-flight air traffic control system.
NOTAM is used to alert pilots before they fly to closed runways, equipment outages, and other possible hazards along a flight route. FAA said it has a backup system which it activated during the hours-long outage over the weekend.
“Just a few days ago, the FAA’s primary aircraft safety notification system failed for several hours!” Musk added to his post, likely in reference to the NOTAM outage.
Not long before Musk’s post, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted on X that he spoke with DOGE who agreed to “plug in to help upgrade our aviation system.”
President Donald Trump confirmed these statements earlier today while speaking to lawmakers at the Capitol for the National Prayer Breakfast where he said that he will ask Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., about passing a single bill to get the “best control system.”
“We’re going to do a great computerized system for our control towers,” said Trump. “Brand new, not pieced together, obsolete … We spent billions and billions of dollars trying to renovate an old broken system instead of just saying, ‘Let’s cut it loose, and let’s spend less money and build a great system.’”
Trump did not provide additional details, and it is unclear how much a complete overhaul would cost or what it would look like.
In January 2023, the first nationwide ground stop since the 9/11 attacks was issued by the FAA after a contractor “unintentionally deleted files,” leading to a NOTAM system outage.
While the agency made administrative changes to its systems after the January outage, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report in September said a 2023 FAA operational risk assessment did not “prioritize or establish near-term plans to modernize” systems.
Trump, Musk, and Duffy’s comments also come a week after a deadly midair collision near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport between an American Airlines passenger plane and a military Black Hawk helicopter. All 67 people involved in the crash were killed, prompting scrutiny of the FAA.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton criticized and reposted Duffy’s post to X sharing the plan to upgrade the FAA’s systems, writing of the DOGE team that “[t]hey have no relevant experience. Most of them aren’t old enough to rent a car. And you’re going to let them mess with airline safety that’s already deteriorated on your watch?”
In September, GAO also reported that over 100 of the FAA’s 138 systems are unsustainable or potentially unsustainable, with half of those resulting in potentially “critical” impacts on airspace operations. The Federal watchdog stressed that the FAA must “urgently” update its unsustainable systems, some of which were deployed up to 60 years ago.
Twenty-seven of the FAA’s ATC systems were found to be unsustainable, according to GAO’s report.
