The idea of privatizing the air traffic control system has taken center stage amid a string of crises affecting U.S. airspace. While USDOT Secretary Sean Duffy unveiled a plan Friday to overhaul the system, several top figures weighed in on the privatization debate.
“The privatization issue comes up a lot,” Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, told Fox News Digital.
Sullivan, a member of the Senate Commerce Committee’s aviation subcommittee and a representative of the most air-travel-interconnected state in the nation, said that he has concerns about the privatization idea.
With the government’s involvement, air traffic control is intended to be uniform across the country by design.
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In a place like Alaska, where 230 communities are not connected by road, private concerns may not have an interest in staffing airfields in the North Slope or out on the Aleutian Chain, preferring Newark or other major hubs.
“You would have a company say, ‘Well, I really don’t need to cover those small Alaskan communities because I’m not going to make any money on it.’ So, I have a lot of skepticism on privatization,” Sullivan said.
“But I don’t have skepticism in the need to update our systems, particularly after many, many different warnings. And I do have a lot of respect for the people who work in air traffic control and the FAA.”
In that regard, Duffy said Thursday he is “seizing a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a brand-new, state-of-the-art air traffic control system.”
“Decades of neglect have left us with an outdated system that is showing its age. Building this new system is an economic and national security necessity, and the time to fix it is now,” Duffy continued, adding that he is taking input from both labor and industrial concerns to upgrade and fix the system, tacitly indicating that it will remain in public hands.
Sullivan cited a recent trip to Anchorage’s FAA hub, where floppy disks and sticky notes were still prevalent decades after the analog era.
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Duffy said that replacing such antiquated technology with new fiber, wireless and satellite iterations at 4,600 sites is in his plan.
Texas Rep. Troy Nehls, the top Republican on the aviation subcommittee and a member of the House Technology Committee, told Fox News Digital that he will be bringing in stakeholders by early June to see how best to implement Duffy’s air traffic control plan and the $12.5 billion reportedly being set aside for it.
“I’m going to do a lot of listening … so we can make a very deliberate and informed decision on how we’re going to spend taxpayer money to modernize the system … I don’t think it’s ever been done before,” Nehls said.
Former commercial and private airline pilot Ryan Tseko, now an executive at Cardone Capital, told Fox News Digital he fully supports privatization.
“I think 1,000% it should run as a private or a nonprofit. I mean, look, other models like even Canada, they’ve already done this,” he said.
“I think efficiencies and innovations from the private side would be number one, a lot quicker and also a lot cheaper. The government just runs at the speed of a snail, and we’ve seen with DOGE and all these other efforts — we pay too much, and we’ve seen other countries [privatize],” he said.
He pointed to other airspace upgrades, like the overhaul to La Guardia Airport in Queens, N.Y., that took much longer than expected and was in dire straits for a long time.
“Instead of having the taxpayers subsidize ATC, there’s got to be a better way to get more technology, more stable funding and also figure out a way to charge back the people who are actually using it.”
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, said Thursday that there is a definite need to “modernize” ATC.
He said some of the FAA’s current technology “seems like it was assembled at a Radio Shack 50 years ago.”
Government cash alone isn’t the “cure for what ails the FAA,” he added, pledging a “long-term focus” from his chairmanship perch on improving airspace safety and protecting the traveling public.
In February, Rep. Sam Graves, R-Mo., said at a hearing that he was pleased to see 34 industry stakeholders signal support for a “consensus-driven approach to modernizing our ATC system.…”
“The solution is privatization,” Chris Edwards, an official with the libertarian CATO Institute wrote separately earlier this year.
“President Trump supported [this during] his first term. In 2017, a bill modeled on Canada’s privatized ATC system passed the House Transportation Committee but then stalled.”
“Air traffic control must not be privatized,” added former NTSB vice chairman Bruce Landsberg in a Newsweek column.
“Experience has shown that privatized ATC systems like those in Canada, the U.K., and elsewhere are troubled by concerns over safety, traffic delays, technical issues, financial instability, and shortages of air traffic controllers,” Landsberg said of private controllers.
Fox News Digital’s Elizabeth Elkind contributed to this report.
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