By David Shepardson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Federal Aviation Administration said on Thursday it wants to adopt a new comprehensive system to overhaul how air traffic controllers receive flight data and move aircraft between facilities.
Congress in July approved a $12.5 billion plan to overhaul the nation’s aging air traffic control system, and boost controller hiring following decades of complaints over airport congestion and flight delays. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has said he wants an additional $19 billion from Congress for air traffic control reform.
Duffy has said the FAA has been forced at times to go to eBay to get spare parts and tech woes repeatedly snarled traffic this summer.
A government report last year said 51 of its 138 air traffic control telecommunications systems were unsustainable.
The FAA said it wants proposals to replace the current en route and terminal systems with a single, state-of-the-art platform for air traffic control called the Common Automation Platform.
The FAA currently uses two systems – En Route Automation Modernization (ERAM) and Standard Terminal Automation Replacement System (STARS) – to track and control aircraft.
ERAM manages high-altitude flights at the FAA’s 20 Air Route Traffic Control Centers, providing data for aircraft navigation between airports. STARS tracks flights near airports in Terminal Radar Approach Control, or TRACON, facilities and air traffic control towers.
The STARS system is used for sequencing planes, issuing conflict alerts and weather updates for arriving and departing aircraft.
The FAA wants to unify the platforms into a single, modern system and the agency previously sought input for a new runway safety lighting system to modernize the air traffic flow system.
In September, the FAA told Reuters it has two candidates vying to become the project manager of the multi-billion-dollar air traffic control overhaul effort known as the “prime integrator.”
Peraton, a national security company owned by Veritas Capital, bid for the position as did Parsons, a technology provider in national security and global infrastructure markets, which partnered with IBM.
Duffy said this week he and FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford need to meet with President Donald Trump in the coming weeks before a selection is made.
(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Chris Reese and Jamie Freed)
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