As the summer travel season starts to take off, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration tells CBS News he has confidence in the system, despite hundreds of FAA facilities being run on decades-old technology.
“Go back to last summer. We saw, you know, 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,” FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said in an exclusive interview with CBS News this week. “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.”
He added, “We have 313 FAA facilities and each of them are essentially running off Compaq computers. …It works, it’s reliable, it’s safe, but it’s not efficient.”
The Transportation Security Administration says its officers screened more than 18.4 million people in the weeklong Memorial Day travel period, and the nation’s airlines expect to fly another 263 million passengers between June 1 and Aug. 31.
But the airlines’ busy season comes after a stretch of high-profile accidents and close calls, as well as a surge in ticket prices due to soaring fuel costs brought on by the Iran war and the collapse of Spirit Airlines.
“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, that the system isn’t fundamentally safe.”
Adding potential uncertainty to the summer, and on the eve of the World Cup, which is expected to bring millions of travelers to the U.S. and Canada, is the possibility the Trump administration could reduce Customs and Border Protection staffing at major airports in sanctuary cities — a list that could include major airline hubs in New York, Newark, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Franscico, Philadelphia, Boston, Seattle and Denver.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said during an interview on Fox News this week that the administration is drawing up plans to do so but has yet to put them into place.
The nation’s travel industries have pushed back on the proposal. Airlines for America, the trade group representing the nation’s biggest airlines, warned in a statement that the move would “have a devastating effect on the airline and tourism industries, causing a significant operational disruption to carriers, travelers and the flow of international cargo.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy also expressed concerns during a recent appearance before lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
“We have people from around the world and around the country that need to be able to fly into all different kinds of places, we shouldn’t shut down air travel in a state that doesn’t agree with our politics,” Duffy said last week.
“What happens inside the airport is, frankly, outside of our wheelhouse,” Bedford said before acknowledging such a policy to reduce CBP staffing could cause disruptions at airports, especially during the busy summer travel season. “There’ll be very limited opportunities to move international flights from one airport to another at this point.”
“Certainly creates a challenge for the airlines themselves because obviously, whether you’re a U.S. citizen or a foreign national, if you’re entering the country from a foreign domain, you’re going to have to clear customs,” he said. “That’ll be a challenge for airlines in order to navigate where there will be Customs and Border check-in points and where they won’t be.”
Bedford spoke to CBS News ahead of a fireside chat focused on modernizing the nation’s aging air traffic control system. The conversation was at the CAPA Airline Leader Summit Americas conference in Charleston, South Carolina, on Thursday.
“We do have a lot of inefficiencies in the system. And when we see those efficiencies bubble up, a weather event, for example… The systems that we use, frankly, need to be improved. We err on the side of safety when we see the storm cell run through because our visibility is more surface level as opposed to upper altitude level… We have technology now that can tell us where those differences lie and create more airspace capacity to continue to move traffic safely, which is something that we’re supposed to do, but we’re not doing that well because we’re limited by the technology that we have,” he said.
Bedford is leading the FAA’s modernization effort to spend $12.5 billion on air traffic control modernization projects by the end of 2028. Work to replace copper communication wire with fiber optics, upgrade or replace voice switches, radios and radar systems is already underway.
The next phase of the modernization effort will cost an estimated additional $10 billion, according to the FAA and Department of Transportation, which Congress will have to approve and will focus on harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to make the nation’s airspace more efficient in how it handles air traffic, as well as the addition of drones and other airborne mobility platforms like air taxis currently in development.
“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.”
Spirit Airlines
The work to future-proof the aviation system comes as several airlines are struggling with the financial impact of rising jet fuel costs and the collapse of Spirit Airlines after a proposed $500 million government bailout failed to materialize.
“Spirit is a victim of too much growth without a fundamental business plan,” Bedford, the former CEO of regional airline Republic Airways, said. “The market worked. I’m glad we didn’t offer them a bailout. In my personal opinion, I think, you know, the administration made the right call that if we’re going to be picking winners and losers, that it’s a slippery slope. Spirit made a lot of bad decisions.”
Boeing
Bedford’s FAA is also charged with overseeing Boeing, as the aerospace giant tries to turn the corner on a host of production and design failures that led to the two deadly 737 Max crashes and a door panel flying off another 737 Max mid-flight. This week, Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg announced the company had received permission to increase 737 Max production to 47 jets per month.
“We supported the capstone to move from 42 to 47. I suspect we’re going to do another capstone in the next 60 to 90 days and discuss taking it to 52,” Bedford said, while pushing for Boeing to begin work on designing its first fully new aircraft since the launch of the 787 nearly 20 years ago. “We certainly want Boeing to get healthy and get on its feet, and we really want Boeing to start thinking about designing and building the next, you know, mid-market aircraft. We want that to happen in the United States.”
Before Boeing can tackle the long-discussed 797 project, it is working to certify two long-delayed variants of the 737 Max — the smallest and largest versions of Boeing’s bestselling narrowbody airliner, the Max 7 and Max 10, as well as the next-generation 777x long-haul jet.
“I think we’re going to see the Dash 7 and the Dash 10 certified before the end of the year, and I, hopefully by spring of next year, we’ve got a line of sight on the 777,” Bedford said.