Jan 6 (Reuters) – The United States awarded contracts on Monday to RTX Corp and Spain’s Indra Sistemas to supply new radars for its aging air traffic control system, an important step in a multi-billion-dollar overhaul, US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a statement.
The awards are a key element of a $12.5 billion plan approved by Congress last year to overhaul the country’s air traffic control system. The effort follows decades of complaints about airport congestion and technological failures, and has gained urgency after a recent series of high-profile security incidents.
Duffy’s statement did not specify the amount of the contracts, but the head of the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Bryan Bedford, said last month that the agency will allocate $6 billion until the end of the year for telecommunications infrastructure for air traffic control and radar surveillance systems.
The agency has said another $20 billion will be needed to complete the full upgrade of the air traffic control system.
“Although our air transportation system is the safest in the world, most of our radars date back to the 1980s. It is unacceptable,” Duffy said.
Problems with the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic control network have been brewing for years, but the avalanche of mishaps, near-miss incidents and last January’s catastrophic crash between a U.S. Army helicopter and an American Airlines regional jet, which killed 67 people, have triggered public alarm.
The contracts will help replace up to 612 radars by June 2028 with modern, commercially available surveillance radars. Replacements are scheduled to begin this quarter and priority will be given to high-traffic areas, according to the release.
The project will install replacement surface radars at 44 airports, purchase 27,625 radios and add 110 weather stations in Alaska.
A 2023 report stated that the Federal Aviation Administration’s communications system had been outdated for years and that the agency could no longer obtain replacement parts for many systems.
In November, the FAA announced that it had chosen Peraton, a national security company owned by Veritas Capital, as project manager to overhaul the aging US air traffic control system.
(Reporting by David Ljunggren; editing by Lisa Shumaker; edited in Spanish by Patrycja Dobrowolska)