Exclusive | Transportation chief Sean Duffy details $31.5B air-traffic improvements to ‘Pod Force One’

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says he is optimistic a “brand new system” for air-traffic control can be implemented in the next four years, previewing plans for the $31.5 billion fix on “Pod Force One.”

Duffy and other top officials have pressed for the pricey upgrade in the wake of the deadly midair disaster near Ronald Reagan National Airport earlier this year — the first major passenger crash in the US since 2009.

“There were 85 near-misses in this airspace in the three years before this crash,” Duffy recently told podcast hose Miranda Devine. “So someone should have seen it in the last administration. They didn’t. Tragedy struck.”

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Last month, Congress approved $12.5 billion of the estimated $31.5 billion price tag needed to complete the ambitious overhaul of the country’s dated air-traffic-control system.

Officials have been reviewing other major airports across the country in New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Alaska and elsewhere to make improvements based on lessons learned from the DC fiasco, Duffy said.

Sixty-seven people died when one of the government’s Black Hawk helicopters collided with an American Airlines passenger jet over the Potomac River in DC in January.

No official cause for the disaster has been released, but experts have suggested issues ranging from poor air-control staffing to the fact that the chopper pilots’ night-vision goggles would have hampered their vision.

“What we’ve seen is there is a need to upgrade our system. It is way too old, and that doesn’t mean it’s not safe, but what we see is, you’re starting to see the cracks in the system,” he said. “You’re starting to see blips in communication.

“I would tell you it’s not easy, it’s really complicated,” he said. “I think we can get it done in three, four years, if all goes well.”

A key aspect of the upgrades will be to switch from copper to fiber optic cables for communications systems within air traffic control.

This emerged as a major problem at New Jersey’s troubled Newark Liberty International Airport, which was dogged by outages earlier this year that led to massive delays and prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to scale down flights at the major travel hub.

Earlier this year, Newark faced about 90 seconds of radar and communications blackouts, which officials later attributed to a fried piece of copper wire that caused a blizzard of flight delays and cancellations.

Before that fiasco, the team of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg moved the Newark airspace control system from New York to the Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON). That move was intended to alleviate staffing issues.

“The problem was, though, that they didn’t test the lines,” Duffy said. “They didn’t make sure it was hardened before they made the move, which led us to these several 30-second outages.”

While the outage at TRACON was 30 seconds, the full blackout was closer to 90 seconds because scopes showing the airplanes had to reboot, costing another minute.

“We have policies in place if that happens on what redundancies kick in, and we did that,” Duffy said, noting that Newark’s communications lines have since been upgraded. “We partnered with Verizon. In a month, they laid a brand new fiber line for us. We tested it the next month, and that has stood up.”

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Now the Transportation Department is looking to make some of those same upgrades to airports across the country and beef up outdated radar systems as well.

But perhaps the more critical upgrade in the works at air traffic control is a new software system, which Duffy says will make it more “efficient, make it safer, to control airspace.”

He teased that the “brand-new” software system will likely be “leaps and bounds” better than the current, dated process and can help with new challenges with emergency technology such as drones that are making airspace more crowded.

“The operating system that we use to control air traffic one dates back to ’95,” Duffy stressed. “So it’s really, really old.”

Duffy described his plans for the new software system as “a common automation platform that’s going to help us have new technology, make it more efficient, make it safer, to control airspace.”