On Thursday, President Donald Trump called for a new computerized air traffic control system—shifting blame on last week’s midair crash to what he described as an “obsolete” system, according to a report from AP News.
We could go the Nav Canada route and privatize it. Charge user fees that are prohibitive to student pilots and skyrockets airfare. There won’t be flight delays and mid-airs if there’s no planes in the sky.
“Conveniently”, it would also mean the understaffed ATC centers would no longer be understaffed and would have more than enough capacity for those wealthy private aircraft owners.
I would be highly surprised if his plan doesn’t include privatizing the ATC system.
So “see and avoid” and “maintain an altitude” are obsolete?
Can barely wait to see what replaces it.
Part of the ATC problem may be that Mode C reports altitudes to the nearest 100 ft. So, 2 aircraft could be reporting altitudes 200 ft different , but could actually be within 50 ft , ie, 249 ft altitude rounds down to 200 ft reported, while 251 ft reports as 300 ft.!!
There are 2 unused bits in the 12 bit gray code reported from the altitude encoder.
But, using 2 of those bits, D4 and D2, to improve the reported accuracy to +/- 25 ft, would require replacing all mode C transponders…ouch.
May be a gov’t subsidy.?
Musk ATC perhaps as a start?
Not with this administration, which aims to massively cut government funding.
It’s in the “Project 2025” plan, page 634:
Well, I must agree the ATC system could use a little “freshening-up.” New technologies must be on-boarded at an increasing pace.
Maybe I’m off-base, but I’m holding out hope for technologies like Virtual Reality for training and surveillance to better position air traffic into the high tech realm. This technology - combined with a system like chat GPT - should “supercharge” the business of air traffic.
“… Archie League would be proud.”
One of the things I have learned dealing with business jet owners is that if ATC were to be privatized jet owners probably wouldn’t care. Remember these are the same people that pay $5000+ at FBO’s for special event fees that are now the norm across the country. Where privatization would hurt is what the first commenter on this thread mentioned, student training and other aviation businesses that operate on thin margins and/or piston or below FL180 operations (drop zones and recreational flyers) VFR ops that are mandated to contact ATC before conducting operations. And it would affect the safety end due to pilots not using flight following or avoiding using ATC to avoid any additional costs involved. There has already been an outcry over some airport authorities trying to use ADS-B signals to charge airport landing fees. Any safety benefit that ADS-B has would go away when operators turn off their ADS-B equipment in an attempt to avoid those charges. Going with an ATC system similar to Nav-Canada or Europe would finish off what is left of piston or low altitude general aviation in the US.
Just imagine how much more that Amazon prime or overnight shipment would cost if that small turboprop airplane that item was shipped on had to pay ATC charges for each flight to ensure that Amazon customer got that item on time! FedEx got its start flying small business jets before it moved up to jets it uses now. They still use small airplanes to get those packages from major cities to smaller airports closer to their destinations in small towns across the country.
“Trump Calls For New Air Traffic Control System”
Well, when the most regulated airspace on the entire planet does not work, it’s an embarrassment. It’s hard to support the status quo when a mid-air happens in eyesight of the capita; building.
President Trump said a bit more than what’s reported here. He faulted the present system for using 39 companies. “That means that 39 different hookups have to happen. And I don’t know how many people of you are good in terms of all of the kinds of things necessary for that. And it’s very complex stuff. But when you have 39 different companies working on hooking up different cities at different people. You need one company. With one set of equipment.” Wonder what company that might be.
User fees would be easy to implement. Elon already has our financial information, courtesy of the Treasury Department. They’d just automatically bill us…
Can promise you this…In our current working conditions with regard to staffing and fatigue, privatizing and reducing pay will equal a net loss and an unsustainable level of qualified controllers still willing to work the same level or mildly reduced level of traffic for reduced pay, worse benefits and no retirement. I say good luck and may the odds be ever in their favor.
Amazon doesn’t care one bit if prices go up for consumers. Neither will business jet operators. Expense items are simply handed through to the customer, likely with a nice markup.
The electorate has spoken. If and when the president decides to focus on “winning” and “fixing” topics which manage to catch his attention (like our ATC system, the FBI or putting a great American shopping mall into Gaza) we’ll see what happens. Just toss a coin, forget about heads or tails and see what happens next. Subject matter competence is unlikely to play a big part in decisions.
Problem I currently see, is that the average citizen - who has absolutely no difficult time to decide which airplane to fly today - is flooded with breathtaking vigor and likely unable to even realize whats happening and what surreal consequences are to be expected. Its a 24/7 news and sensation bombardement.
Its very likely that a fairly simple to comprehend midair collision will finally bring the momentum to propell us into a user funded NAS and ATC system.
It will be quite interesting to see what happens when people start asking who voted Musk, Bezos and Sugarmountain into office and gave them a blank check to do as they please.
Interesting times, indeed!
From what has been published so far, the discussion of the collision should focus on (1) the Army pilot’s failure to follow the traffic rules coupled with (2) the Army pilot’s using field of vision reducing glasses during see and avoid operations in high-threat dense environment, and also coupled with (3) the Army not using all available threat avoidance electronics in aircaft operating in domestic airspace. ATC was not at fault directly, the Army was. So fix the Army before changing ATC.
Yes, that would be called X - ATC 
.
We have a privatised national aviation authority (FAA equivalent) and when that started decades ago fees went up. Previously rather nominal fees for licensing became less nominal and airlines now pool manual revisions to save approval fees. Fees are based on previous years expenditures, so there’s no profit but no built-in encouragement to stay frugal. There’s a kind of user council that can exert some influence on financial decisions (which creates problems of its own). As the “privatised” system is still government-owned top-level appointments are of course political. As a US pilot I’d be even more afraid of a full-blown privatisation with owners expecting a profit which is easy to achieve if there is no and can’t be any competition. I’d also be afraid of Mr. M improving the system using the “fail quickly, fail better” concept applied to his rocketry business.