As a boy, a favorite movie of mine was The Crowded Sky, a tale of air traffic mishaps that led to a mid-air collision between an airliner and a Navy jet because the equipment was unreliable. Today’s skies are far more crowded but we’re still relying on the same outdated air traffic equipment to prevent a similar real life tragedy from occurring.

Each day the United States has 26,000 scheduled passenger flights, carrying over 2.5 million people, with 5,000 aircraft aloft at any given moment. That’s almost six times as many miles as Americans flew in the era of The Crowded Sky, yet the modernization of air traffic has not kept pace.