Thread by @wmahoney5

❤️‍🔥🔥🧨1/19 ALERT thread on our aging Air Traffic Control system. TERRIFYING. The GAO says FAA actions are URGENTLY NEEDED to modernize aging systems. This is no joke. "These challenges are due to, among other things, availability of parts, growing airspace demand, and expanding mission needs. FAA anticipates continued growth and forecasts that air travel will increase, on average, by 6.2 percent annually."

2/Last year, FAA found 51 of its 138 systems are "unsustainable" meaning have outdated parts, lack of spare parts, etc Some of the modernization will not be complete for another 10-13 years and no plans to modernize other systems, 3 of which are at least 30 years old. 17 of the most critical systems are an average of 26 years old.

3/Four of the critical systems have no ongoing investments.

4/Do you remember when national airspace was shut down in 2023? That was because of the aging ATC. That shut down prompted a review of our ATC system. Of the 105 unsustainable (dangerous) and potentially unsustainable systems, 58 have critical impacts on the safety and efficiency of our national airspace. The FAA has been slow to modernize. "On January 11, 2023, the system became temporarily unavailable to users. To ensure safety, FAA grounded all departing aircraft for about 2 hours to fix the system. The outage caused over 1,300 flight cancellations and almost 10,000 flight delays throughout the day. Some airlines took several days to fully recover."

5/The FAA is failing to "prioritize or establish near-term plans to modernize the system."There are significant gaps in accountability, in some cases no time frames for guidance to increase oversight of investments in the systems. "FAA did not always prioritize or establish near-term plans to modernize the most critical and at-risk systems that were identified by the [2023] assessment."

6/Additionally, when reviewed quarterly, the FAA did not deliver functionality nor did it "consistently monitor high risks." Issues like these "limit FAA's ability to mitigate cost and schedule overruns, increases the risk of system failures, and reduces informed decision making."

7/The FAA is delayed in implementing its NexGen ATC system. NextGen will be the move from a ground-based air-traffic control system that uses radar, to one based on satellite and digital communications. Forget Mars, lookin at you @elonmusk for solutions here.

8/ source for NextGen GAO review. "The FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 requires FAA to operationalize key NextGen programs and sunset its Office of NextGen by the end of 2025."What GAO found👇👇 gao.gov/products/gao-2…

9/GAO also found that the airlines are not consistently keeping up with "equipage for certain navigation, communications, and surveillance avionics....aircraft not equipped with advanced avionics for navigation can cause slowdowns at certain airport hubs, even for aircraft that are equipped, since controllers must use procedures that align with each aircraft’s equipage."

10/Also, "FAA faces several other challenges, such as cybersecurity risks, posed by a more internet-based, interconnected NAS; the integration of new airspace entrants (such as drones and commercial spacecraft); and potential spectrum interference from wider use of the fifth generation of mobile communication networks (5G), which could potentially interfere with aircraft navigation systems."

11/The number of FAA ATC modernization investments by acquisition category, 64 total, 16 of which are new investments.

12/Navigation equipment (such as approach lighting systems)have been found to have high failure risk. Some of the equipment "cannot be supported or cannot be repaired with personal computer-based equipment"

13/Table of costs for selected ATC systems investments. Completion dates in many cases pushed out several years.

14/ These are the 7 recommendations GAO made to the FAA, including better Congressional oversight, establishing time frames and baselines for improvements- you know, the basic stuff required every day in private industry.

15/"While the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 requires FAA to report to Congress on its plans to address legacy systems beginning in 2026, in the interim, Congress may not have important information on how FAA is managing risks associated with these systems."

16/ As shown in table below, most of the investments have taken "a significant amount of time to modernize unsustainable or potentially unsustainable systems, impacting FAA's ability" to function safely.

17/Big take-away? Government program full of potential waste, lack of accountability for an aging system that could result in disaster. It is taking way too long to deploy the needed changes.

18/Oh, and by the way, FENS or FAA Enterprise Network Services is in process of being implemented. It "will provide FAA with modern ethernet/internet protocol telecommunications infrastructure (e.g. cabling) to, among other things, enable highly available and secure voice and data communications and networking capabilities needed to enable critical operations. FENS was initiated in April 2018. As of May 2024, FAA had not yet established an acquisition baseline, and preliminarily estimated that FENS would cost about $2.0 billion, and be completed in 2038. As of May 2024, FENS had obligated $105 million."

19/Please see full report from September 2024 here gao.gov/assets/gao-24-…