Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says President Donald Trump supports his plan to modernize the air traffic control system and it will be unveiled on Thursday. In a Fox News interview, Duffy said the multi-billion dollar plan will be transformative. “We are going to radically transform the way air traffic control looks,” Duffy told Laura Ingraham. “We’re going to build a brand new air traffic control system, from new telecom to new radars to new infrastructure.” In the meantime he’s asking airlines to voluntarily cut back flights at hotspots like Newark Liberty Airport, which had some serious problems last week.
Some reports say that for 90 seconds on April 28, radar and communications went out at Newark. Duffy told Ingraham it was 30 seconds and downplayed the seriousness of the incident. “Were planes going to crash? No, they have communication devices. They can see other air traffic,” the transportation secretary continued. “But it’s a sign that we have a frail system in place, and it has to be fixed.” Many controllers on duty at the time seemed to disagree on the gravity of the incident. They took 45 days of “trauma leave” after the outage and that further compounded delays and cancellations for the rest of the week. It was still a mess on Monday with almost all flights delayed, cancelled or diverted.
