Bedford highlights ATC overhaul progress, urges continued funding

Bedford highlighted progress in the Brand New Air Traffic Control System (BNATCS) initiative that began in May 2025, including the conversion of 64 percent of copper wire to fiber, upgrades to more than 400 radio systems, converting 22 towers from paper to digital flight strips, and the deployment of more than 100 surface awareness systems at airports across the country.

In his testimony, Bedford said the $12.5 billion “down payment” signed into law in July 2025 will not cover all of the first phase of work, as originally anticipated. Instead, he said, it will cost up to $16 billion, and the agency’s 2027 budget request includes $1.5 billion to help close that gap. Bedford also said additional funding will be needed for future phases.

“If we halt the momentum now, and don’t accomplish the tasks associated with [the next phase] of modernization, once again we will see the system slip into higher delays, higher cancellations, and less resilient airspace,” said Bedford.

Several lawmakers questioned Bedford about a report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released the day prior that found while progress has been made, the agency “has not developed a comprehensive and well-documented lifecycle cost” for the overhaul, and it said that there is no integrated scheduling being done for the 11,389 projects.

Bedford called the report a “wonderful document” and stated the FAA asked the GAO for this report for transparency and accountability.

“There is tremendously useful information in their report on just the magnitude of the problems, the challenges that we face in modernization,” said Bedford.

But he pushed back on the report’s finding, saying that the agency does have “lifecycle cost estimates for the entire project and… a highly integrated master work schedule.”

The GAO report also noted that the FAA released its first comprehensive plan for ATC modernization in 1982 with a price tag of $10 billion. By 1995, the estimated cost nearly quadrupled to $36 billion, and the GAO classified it as a “high-risk area” due to delays and overruns. It then detailed subsequent efforts by the agency to modernize decades-old systems, and stated that while each made progress, none fully accomplished its mission.

The GAO said the first phase of BNATCS was designed to “significantly accelerate the delivery of the existing investments or expand the scope of existing investments,” according to the report.

The GAO report comes two years after a 2024 report from the same agency found that three-quarters of the FAA’s 138 ATC systems were “unsustainable or potentially unsustainable,” and that the FAA “was not moving fast enough to modernize its systems.”

“For more than 30 years, we’ve seen ATC modernization efforts not accomplish their goals time and again,” said AOPA Senior Vice President of Government Affairs and Advocacy Jim Coon. “For the first time in decades, we’re starting to see the finish line. We have the momentum, and along with the Modern Skies Coalition, we will continue to do our part to ensure this effort is successful.”

While Bedford and lawmakers did not discuss the amount needed to complete additional phases of work, Bedford did say the agency’s annual budget cannot cover it. The FAA and the Modern Skies Coalition have previously said completing the work will require an additional $20 billion.

“We’ve got to bring the systems into the twenty-first century,” said Bedford. “We’ve got to bring our controller interfaces into the twenty-first century and we have to bring our data architecture into the twenty-first century.”

“I can see more today on my iPad than any controller can see in the entire national aviation system,” added Bedford. “That’s how archaic the tools that we currently have are.”

Bedford also discussed the use of artificial intelligence at the FAA and as part of the ATC modernization effort, and said AI has been “fantastic at parsing through terabytes of data” to help the agency identify “trends, correlation, or causation” in regard to aviation safety.

“The way the FAA thinks about the use of AI is a decision help tool, not a decision replacement tool, so we’re not taking humans out of the loop,” said Bedford.