Federal Aviation Administration Administrator Bryan Bedford promised the country this week that air travel is safe, after a series of system failures have left travelers on edge.
Outages at Newark Liberty International Airport last year were among those that led Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to issue warnings that airports are relying on decades-old equipment, saying he was “concerned about the whole airspace.”
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In a CBS interview published Friday, Bedford said that at least “most” equipment failures have been corrected, though he said some infrastructure remains antiquated. The FAA chief sought to assure the public that he has “zero concerns” that the system “isn’t fundamentally safe,” with his words coming as officials gear up for a historic summer of travel, due to the FIFA World Cup matches in the United States and landmark celebrations for the country’s 250th birthday.
“I think we’re set up for a great summer. I feel like we’ve got the people in place,” Bedford said. “The system is every bit as safe today as it was 10 years ago or five years ago. I fly it every week multiple times, put my family on, I have zero concerns, I lose no sleep whatsoever.”
“Go back to last summer. We saw equipment failures in Washington, Newark, Philadelphia, places where the system was just breaking. Most of that has been corrected, not all of it,” he added. “We still have, I think, some real reliability risk in the system because we’re running off of 1970s and ’80s computing power, compact disks. It’s crazy what the system is using today. …There’s a lot of floppy disks still in the system.”
In the wake of technical difficulties, crashes, and near collisions near or at multiple major airports, including a collision near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport that killed 67 people in January 2025, officials last year rolled out a multibillion-dollar modernization plan to revamp the U.S. air traffic control system.
“[Flying] is safe, but it’s not safe because we have the best system in place,” Duffy said last month as he detailed how much progress has been made in implementing the $12.5 billion initiative. “It’s safe because we have fantastic air traffic controllers and highly skilled pilots.”
Much work has already been done to replace decades-old copper communication wire with fiber-optics, as well as to upgrade or replace voice switches, radios, and radar systems. But Bedford said this week that the next phase of the project will be vital to moving ATC systems into the modern age. He is asking Congress to approve $10 billion in funding to use artificial intelligence to make air traffic more efficient, as well as to add drones and other airborne mobility platforms, such as air taxis.
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“The $10 billion fixes the data architecture that we have today, gives us unlimited computing power, getting into the cloud and then it brings us the opportunity to have a fully interoperable system,” Bedford said. “Today we have three legacy technology stacks that aren’t interoperable … We can replace that technology with a unified system that allows us to see the entire national airspace situation in real time.”
“We have 313 FAA facilities and each of them are essentially running off Compaq computers,” he added. “It works, it’s reliable, it’s safe, but it’s not efficient.”
