We still don’t know how many mistakes led to the collision of a helicopter with an American Airlines passenger jet making its descent at Reagan National Airport last week. But one thing has been clear for decades: America’s air-traffic control system, once the world’s most advanced, has become an international disgrace.
Long before the Obama and Biden administrations’ quest to diversify staff in control towers, the system was already one of the worst in the developed world. The recent rash of near-collisions is the result of chronic mismanagement that has left the system with too few controllers using absurdly antiquated technology.
The problems were obvious 20 years ago, when I visited control towers in both Canada and the United States. The Canadians sat in front of sleek computer screens that instantly handled tasks like transferring the oversight of a plane from one controller to another. The Americans were still using pieces of paper called flight strips. After a plane took off, the controller in charge of the local airspace had to carry that plane’s flight strip over to the desk of the controller overseeing the regional airspace. It felt like going back in time from a modern newsroom into a scene from The Front Page.
It was bad enough to see such outdated technology in 2005. But they’re still using those paper flight strips in American towers, and the Federal Aviation Administration’s modernization plans have been delayed so many times that the strips aren’t due to be phased out until 2032. The rest of the system is similarly archaic. The U.S. is way behind Europe in using satellites to guide and monitor planes, forcing pilots and controllers to rely on much less precise readings from radio beacons and ground-based radar.
Overseas controllers use high-resolution cameras and infrared sensors to monitor planes on runways, but many American controllers still have to look out the window—which is why a FedEx cargo plane almost landed on top of another plane two years ago in Austin, Texas. It was a foggy morning, and the controller couldn’t see that a Southwest airliner was on the same runway waiting to take off. At the last minute, the FedEx pilot aborted the landing, missing the other plane by less than 100 feet.
The basic problem, which reformers have been trying to remedy since the Clinton administration, is that the system is operated by a cumbersome federal bureaucracy—the same bureaucracy that’s also responsible for overseeing air safety. The FAA is supposed to be a watchdog, but we’ve put it in charge of watching itself.
Nearly all other developed countries sensibly separate these roles, so that a federal aviation agency oversees an independent corporation that operates the control towers and the rest of the system, functioning as a public utility. This independent operator can be a state-owned company (as in Australia, Switzerland, Germany, and Scandinavian countries), a nonprofit corporation (as in Canada), or a company with private investors (as in the United Kingdom and Italy).
In 2017, the Trump administration and Republican congressional leadership tried creating a similar system in the U.S., operated by a not-for-profit corporation. The bill was backed by some Democrats and by a broad coalition that included even the union representing air-traffic controllers, which had previously helped block reform but finally decided that this was the only way to fix the system. The legislation also enjoyed support from unions representing pilots and flight attendants, the major airlines, and a bipartisan array of former officials at the FAA and the Department of Transportation.
The bill went nowhere, partly because many legislators, especially Democrats, wanted to retain Congress’ control over the system—and the campaign contributions and pork-barrel opportunities that came with it. But the effort was doomed mainly because of opposition from private plane owners, who pay a pittance for the services they use. Though the legislation guaranteed that they would not be charged new user fees, their lobbyists scared enough lawmakers to quash it.
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Eliminating diversity mandates is just one small step in the right direction. The system will remain mired in mid-twentieth-century technology until it’s run by an independent corporation accountable to regulators but freed from congressional micromanagement, annual budget battles, and the federal bureaucracy’s convoluted hiring and procurement regulations. Experience in Canada and other countries shows that an independent corporation, able to issue its own revenue bonds because it’s funded directly by user fees instead of taxes, can modernize air-traffic control far more efficiently and cheaply than a government agency.
Reforming the system is an ideal issue for the new administration, particularly Elon Musk and his team at DOGE. It would help drain the D.C. swamp, shrink the federal budget deficit, improve aviation safety, reduce flight delays, conserve fuel, lower carbon emissions, and save money for airlines and passengers. It’s inspiring to dream of sending Americans to Mars in a new Golden Age, but the ones flying closer to home are still stuck in the Stone Age.
