FAA’s Bedford Provides Glimpse into U.S. ATC’s Future

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford provided a deeper look at the “brand new” air traffic control (ATC) system that the agency is striving for, outlining a network that is quieter, more seamless, and more efficient for a pilot.

“From a pilot’s perspective, I think they’re going to have much greater precision about their flight trajectories as they’re navigating through the airspace,” Bedford told attendees at the monthly Aero Club of Washington, D.C., luncheon on Wednesday. “It should be much quieter from coast to coast because we should require much fewer handoffs as you move through the system.”

He conceded that the FAA still has “some holes...to plug into this plan,” but those are the high-level end goals.

Bedford described the current state of the National Airspace System (NAS) as highly variant and co-dependent with “highly inoperable systems.”

“We’ve got a lot of great technology,” he said, explaining, “None of it is knitted well together. The surveillance system itself, due to technology limitations from the 1970s and 1980s, essentially carved up the airspace into 200 sectors, and as the airplanes manage through these sectors, you’re deconflicted tactically as you migrate through, so it requires a lot of human intervention. It requires a lot of eyes on scopes and whatnot.”

But the technology currently available can strategically deconflict trajectories before an aircraft takes off, he added. “We can look at 50,000 flight operations a day, and we can design the routes of flight to be highly deconflicted from the start, and so now we’re dealing with the variables, whether that’s in flight emergency, a medical emergency, or a weather event—the things that you can’t control will become variance as opposed to everything.”

A key to making this happen, he cautioned, will be the airspace users. This will require a cultural shift from focusing on takeoff to when they want to land. “We’ll tell you where we want you to be in three dimensions…and we’ll tell you where we want you to be to hit that top of descent mark to [meet] the constraints of the runway, not the airspace itself. But, we have to manage it as a system, and today it’s not.”

Many aircraft already have capabilities to fly in such a system, and individual operators have their own systems. But they are not collectively optimized from an overarching system design, he explained.

FAA and Department of Transportation officials have been vocal about the need for more money to accomplish these goals, but Bedford acknowledged that the FAA has to prove it can provide results first with the money it has been given already.

When asked about past lessons from prior modernization efforts, Bedford joked, “We’re not supposed to talk NextGen,” but added that it brought a lot of good technologies, such as ADS-B.

“The challenge with how we think about NextGen is the iteration cycle was pacing at the speed of Boeing—so every two decades, Boeing wants to build a new airplane, and we do all that work to do those quantum technology leaps every 20 years,” Bedford said.

But with ATC, he continued, “By the time we get to that 20-year innovation point, it’s already obsolete. We're going to have to change our innovation cycle from Boeing to more like Apple or Tesla. That’s a mind-space shift here at the FAA, but it’s achievable.”

He stressed, though, that the FAA must have early wins to prove the concept. “That’s what we’re hoping to see happen this year…We started this concept of think slow, move quickly.”

The agency, in tandem with DOT, spent about 100 days on the definition stage, and now it’s ready to move. “The agency has moved very quickly on our integrator selection. Now we’ve signed our radar installations. We took a 20-year telecom conversion plan—it started in 2018 and was designed to finish in 2038—and we’ve accelerated that, compressed it into less than a three-year timeline.”

That plan is now slated to be completed in the third quarter of 2027, he added. “We’re doing it. The FAA is doing it.”