The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report that both lauded the FAA’s efforts to modernize the air traffic control system and criticized the agency for moving too quickly without the support of a master schedule to track the thousands of projects involved in the upgrades.
The modernization program is embodied in the FAA’s Brand New Air Traffic Control System (BNATCS) program, which is initially funded through Congress’ appropriation of $12.5 billion. However, according to the GAO, the FAA will use most of that money to pay for Phase 1 of the BNATCS, which involves infrastructure fixes such as replacing copper wires with fiber-optic cables. Another $10.2 billion is needed for Phase 2 to pay for automation systems that will track aircraft and optimize traffic.
Specific recommendations from the GAO are that the “FAA prioritize (1) developing a reliable lifecycle cost estimate for BNATCS and (2) developing a detailed integrated master schedule for BNATCS Phase 1.”
These recommendations reflect that the FAA has provided only high-level estimates for Phase 1, according to the GAO, without any analysis to support those numbers and without an integrated master schedule. “Instead, FAA has 11,389 individual project schedules that are not integrated. As a result, individual projects are scheduled for installations at the same sites, generally without optimizing the schedules to reduce impacts to controller operations.”
These problems add heightened risk to the BNATCS, the GAO added. “GAO’s decades-long bodies of work on acquisitions and FAA modernizations indicate that these risks increase the likelihood of FAA repeating its history of cost overruns, delays, and unmet performance targets. If these risks are realized, FAA would need to continue to rely on severely outdated systems that are prone to failure, leading to more flight delays and safety incidents.”
There are FAA plans to address these issues, the GAO noted, but “they did not have a time frame for when [these] would be resolved.”
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