Why the air traffic control rebuild started with the wires
The Newark outages that preceded Washington’s May 2025 air traffic control plan failed in the links between facilities. For agencies modernizing systems that cannot stop, the transport layer, the cutover and the workforce deserve as much planning as the applications.
Looking Back revisits one week at a time, from January 2020 to today, and asks what it meant for the banks, health systems and public agencies we serve. The series was written in 2026, with the benefit of hindsight, and each article says which week it looks back on.
The week
On May 8, 2025, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced a plan to build a new air traffic control system over several years. It would replace aging copper telecommunications lines with fiber, wireless and satellite links, install new radars and radios, and upgrade facilities, and he asked Congress for funding. The plan followed an April 28 failure in which controllers at the Philadelphia facility handling approaches to Newark lost radar and radio contact with aircraft for somewhere between 30 and 90 seconds. Newark endured weeks of delays, compounded by runway construction and staffing shortages. The day after the announcement, on May 9, a second brief outage hit the same facility. Officials linked the failures to the telecommunications lines carrying radar data between New York and Philadelphia, some of them old copper.
Few government systems are as visibly critical as air traffic control, which made the May 2025 plan an unusually public case study in legacy modernization. Agency CIOs who run benefits systems, emergency dispatch, tax processing or court records face the same problem at smaller scale. Their systems mostly work, cannot be taken offline, and depend on parts nobody makes anymore. Modernizing such a system has four distinct parts: the transport layer that connects its sites, the application functions that run on it, the cutover from old to new, and the people who operate and maintain both. The Newark episode exposed weakness in each, and the plan’s order of work started with the first.
The transport layer: where critical systems actually fail
The Newark failures did not start in a radar or a controller’s display. They started in the circuits carrying radar data and radio traffic between facilities. When those links dropped, controllers lost their picture of the sky. On May 9, according to officials’ public accounts, the backup line did not take over as intended. That detail matters more than the age of the wire. A redundant circuit that has never failed over under real conditions is an assumption, not a control.
Many agencies share this hidden dependency. Public safety answering points, state data centers, motor vehicle offices and remote clinics often rely on carrier circuits that are now being retired as telecommunications companies withdraw copper services. These circuits rarely appear in modernization roadmaps. They belong to the network team or to the carrier, and they are paid for out of a telecom budget nobody reviews. They should be inventoried first, with three facts for each: what it carries, whether a diverse path exists, and when failover was last tested end to end.
Diverse paths need checking, too. Two circuits bought from two carriers can still share a conduit, a central office or a bridge crossing. Agencies should ask carriers for route diversity documentation and repeat the request after any network change. A failover test that pulls the primary circuit during a staffed maintenance window, with operators watching, tells the agency more than any diagram.
The functions on top: replace by capability, behind owned interfaces
The plan covered radars, radios, automation software and facilities. Replacing all of that at once is rarely feasible. The workable approach is to define the functions the system must deliver, such as surveillance, communications and flight data, and replace each behind stable interfaces.
Agencies can apply the same pattern. An unemployment insurance system can be modernized by function: identity proofing, claims intake, eligibility determination, payments. Each function can move on its own schedule if the interfaces between them are defined well. The risk sits in those interfaces. Vague interfaces couple every function to every other, and the project slides back into a single large replacement.
Interfaces also decide how dependent the agency becomes on one vendor. Documented, standard interfaces let a component be replaced later without reopening the whole system. Proprietary ones tend to make the first vendor the only realistic choice for every later phase. Agencies should own the interface specifications outright, write them into solicitations, and require vendors to build and test against them.
The cutover: two systems at once, funded explicitly
Air traffic control cannot pause for a migration weekend, and neither can 911 dispatch or a payments system. Modernization means running old and new in parallel, often for months or years, with a tested way back if the new component fails.
Parallel running roughly doubles certain operating costs for a period and needs staff fluent in both systems. Budgets usually fund the new system and assume the old one simply stops. Agency leaders should require that cutover costs appear as their own line items: duplicate operations, data reconciliation, rollback rehearsal and the extended maintenance contract for the legacy platform. A plan without those lines is a plan to cut corners at the riskiest moment. Program offices should also define cutover exit criteria in advance, such as a period of matched outputs between old and new, so the decision to switch off the legacy system is evidence-based rather than schedule-driven.
The people: operators, maintainers and overseers
Newark was also a staffing story. Shortages among controllers and technicians magnified the effect of every equipment failure. New systems need trained operators, and old systems need maintainers until the day they retire. Both groups are scarce, and the maintainers are often close to retirement themselves.
A modernization plan therefore needs a workforce plan with named answers. Who keeps the legacy platform alive, and on what contract? Who learns the new one, and when? How does knowledge of undocumented interfaces move from the first group to the second? Losing the last person who understands an old interface mid-transition is a common and avoidable failure.
The workforce plan also covers the agency’s own technical oversight. Large programs are usually delivered by contractors and integrators. The agency still has to judge their work, accept or reject deliverables and make architecture decisions. Agencies that outsource that judgment along with the delivery tend to discover problems late, when they cost most to fix.
With hindsight
Congress provided a first tranche of $12.5 billion for air traffic control modernization in the budget reconciliation law signed on July 4, 2025. The FAA issued a request for solutions for a prime integrator in late August, and in December 2025 it selected Peraton to coordinate the design, testing and deployment of the new system. Public descriptions of the program put the transition from copper to fiber among its early priorities. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said further funding, on the order of $20 billion, would be needed to finish the job.
By this point in 2026 the program is in its early implementation years, and we would claim nothing more about its progress. The approach it took, starting with the network links and appointing a single integrator to manage many parallel projects, matches the structure above. Agencies facing copper retirement in their own networks now have a public reference for why the wires come first.