The Memorial Day weekend, widely celebrated as the launch of the summer travel season, saw an onslaught of travelers taking to the skies, with the Transportation Security Administration reporting that its officers screened more than 18.4 million travelers. Furthermore, airlines are predicting that they’ll transport an additional 263 million passengers between June 1 and Aug. 31.
Going forward into the summer, however, questions remain about whether aging technology at Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) facilities will be able to accommodate surges in air travel.
To remedy the situation, the U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy had requested $10 billion from Congress for the next phase of upgrading America’s air traffic control system.
In the meantime, FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford is confident that the system is safe, albeit ineffective.
“Go back to last summer. We saw… equipment failures in Washington, Newark, Philadelphia, places where the system was just breaking,” Bedford said in an interview with CBS News.
“Most of that has been corrected, not all of it,” he added. “We still have, I think, some real reliability risk in the system because we’re running off of 1970s and ‘80s computing power… There’s a lot of floppy disks still in the system.”
He noted that the “313 FAA facilities and each of them are essentially running off Compaq computers, and while they’re reliable and safe, “it’s not efficient.”
Nonetheless Bedford reiterated that the FAA is poised for a “great summer.”
“I feel like we’ve got the people in place. The system is every bit as safe today as it was 10 years ago or five years ago,” he said.
“I fly it every week multiple times, put my family on, I have zero concerns, I lose no sleep whatsoever, that the system isn’t fundamentally safe,” Bedford added.
Meanwhile, strides in improving the efficiency of the system are well underway. The FAA hit an important milestone in its effort to modernize a critical safety system in the U.S.’s national airspace.
The agency completed the first phase of its overhaul of the “Notices to Airmen” system, which is used to communicate key aviation safety information to pilots and flight planners during flights.
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