The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has awarded contracts to two companies to overhaul the nation’s 40-year-old radar systems as part of its efforts to modernize the U.S. air traffic control (ATC) system.
The agency awarded RTX and Indra contracts to replace 612 legacy radar systems with modern, commercially available radars by June 2028, FAA officials said in an announcement Monday.
The radar systems will start to be replaced as soon as this quarter, the FAA said, and it will deploy the new technology on a rolling basis while prioritizing high-traffic areas.
“While our air travel system is the safest in the world, most of our radars date back to the 1980s. It’s unacceptable,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a statement. “Thanks to President Trump and the One Big Beautiful Bill, we’ll begin replacing this outdated technology to boost safety and enable the next big wave of innovation in our skies.”
In July, Congress’s reconciliation bill provided a $12.5 billion down payment to modernize the nation’s ATC systems after multiple outages prompted increased congressional attention – while radar systems in place today date back to the 1980s, other technologies are from the 1960s.
RTX and Indra will work with Peraton, which was named the FAA’s prime integrator to oversee phase one of the agency’s modernization project.
The FAA recently announced the second phase of its modernization efforts, which will focus on designing and building new air route traffic control centers, though no contract has been awarded.
In addition to replacing the radars, the FAA said it will consolidate the 14 different existing radar systems in the national airspace in order to simplify maintenance and logistics, though it didn’t detail what centralized system will be used.
“Our radar network is outdated and long overdue for replacement. Many of the units have exceeded their intended service life, making them increasingly expensive to maintain and difficult to support,” said FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford in a statement. “We are buying radar systems that will bring production back to the U.S. and provide a vital surveillance backbone to the National Airspace System.”