“Our radar network is outdated and long overdue for replacement. Many of the units have exceeded their intended service life, making them increasingly expensive to maintain and difficult to support,” FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said.
The FAA has been spending most of its $3 billion equipment budget just maintaining the fragile old system that still relies on floppy discs in places. Some of the equipment is old and isn't manufactured anymore, so the FAA sometimes has to search for spare parts on eBay.
Technical failures twice knocked out the radar for air traffic controllers managing planes around Newark Liberty International Airport last spring, and those problems led to thousands of cancellations and delays at the major hub airport.
Redundancy in the system helps keep flights safe, but there have been a number of occasions when both the primary and backup systems failed, as happened in the Philadelphia facility directing planes into and out of the Newark airport.
The FAA didn’t immediately provide an estimate of the cost of the new radar systems that will replace 14 different existing radar systems in use across the country and will simplify maintenance and repairs.
The FAA has already committed more than $6 billion of the $12.5 billion that Congress approved to pay for the overhaul, but Duffy has said that another $20 billion will be needed to complete the project. The agency has already replaced more than one-third of the outdated copper wires the system was relying on with modern connections like fiber optic lines, and it hired a national security contractor named Peraton to oversee the work.