“The ancient infrastructure is buckling,” says the President of the USA, Donald J Trump.

His subject is the state of America’s air traffic control (ATC) services, but he does have a solution: “We’d like to give out one big, beautiful contract, where they are responsible for everything from digging ditches to the most-complicated stuff”.

Trump has casually tossed a simple solution to a serious national infrastructure problem into someone else’s in-tray. But is this even in his gift?

The political in-tray belongs to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who agrees with Trump about the state of the air traffic management (ATM) system. Needing somebody to blame after the 29 January fatal mid-air collision between an army helicopter and a PSA Airlines Bombardier CRJ700 that was on final approach to land at Washington DC’s Reagan airport, Duffy attributed the crash to “our outdated, World War II-era air traffic control system”. Having delivered that verdict, he named his predecessor, President Joe Biden’s Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg as the man responsible for the state of US ATM.

Meanwhile, taking Trump at his word when he said “We’d like to give out one big, beautiful contract…”, the chief executive of a major US electronics company is – surely – soon going to feel the thud of a massive Concept of Operations document landing in his in-tray. So will Chris Rocheleau, the Trump-appointed Acting Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration. Rocheleau, an experienced FAA man, was given the job in January, but so far no actual Administrator has been appointed.

In the USA, the FAA is responsible for providing ATM. The Administration’s two main tasks are the safety oversight and regulation of the entirety of the USA’s aerospace and air transport industry, plus the provision of ATM and its operating infrastructure. Unusually, therefore, the FAA oversees the safety of its own ATM system.

Finance for the FAA comes from the Airport and Airways Trust Fund (AATF), financed in turn by the users of the system who are charged taxes on domestic passenger tickets, freight carriage charges, fuel, and international departures and arrivals. These proceeds, which fund nearly 90% of the FAA’s costs, don’t go direct to the FAA: congress annually appropriates funds from the AATF for the FAA – but in practice it quite often delays the appropriation, bringing aviation to a halt for a few days. The reality is that the FAA is a state-owned utility.

Returning again to Trump’s stated plan for “one big, beautiful contract” to upgrade America’s ATM and air navigation services, unless the President has the FAA in mind as contractor (unlikely), he must be referring to private industry.

So who are the industry candidates to take the lead in this “big, beautiful contract”? If Trump’s plan goes ahead, one company will lead, and the others will contribute. The line-up looks something like this: Raytheon, Thales, Adacel Technologies, L3 Harris, Honeywell, IBM, SpaceX (Starlink), and Verizon (telecomms). Trump’s “America First” policy might rule out Thales for being French, although it is huge, global, and has a big US division.

What will Duffy require of this agglomeration of US industrial expertise? Here are some extracts from public statements of intent he has made in the last few months about ATM modernisation: “Rebuilding some ATC towers, control centres and Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) facilities; new telecom, new fibre… We are going to have brand new radios in our towers, new radar for the ground, and new sensors on our tarmacs; all the front-facing equipment for controllers, all the back-end systems for controllers – all brand new; all new hardware… All new software… A new flight management system that will support flights of future air taxies – the electric vertical take-off and vertical landing aircraft now under development by numerous firms.”

What is more, all of this will be accomplished within four years, says Duffy. A bill to approve funding to the tune of $12.5 billion is working its way through the House of Representatives.

The sheer size of the task of raising this system from its current state of repair can be gauged from a recent event. On 28 April, controllers at the Philadelphia TRACON “temporarily lost radar and communications with the aircraft under their control, unable to see, hear or talk to them”. That summary of the event was provided by the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA). Controllers at that facility are responsible for “separating and sequencing” jets flying to and from Newark airport, New Jersey, one of the three main airports serving New York city.

In the last few days the Philadelphia TRACON problems have recurred, according to Duffy, who resorts again to blaming Buttigieg. Meanwhile Newark airport is talking to airlines about reducing the flow-rate of traffic there for safety reasons. And the whole problem is exacerbated by a shortage of air traffic control officers (ATCO), which Duffy has acknowledged is nation-wide, and which the National Transportation Safety Board is examining as a possible contributory factor in the Washington DC collision.

Good luck to the FAA and its partner companies in this massive endeavour. They’ll need it!