Transportation Department launches website tracking air traffic control upgrades

The Transportation Department launched a public website Monday to track the long-running effort to modernize the nation’s air traffic control system, a move aimed as much at accountability as at public relations. With the TSA expecting to screen more than 18 million travelers for Memorial Day weekend and the FAA forecasting 5.4 million flights from Memorial Day through Labor Day, officials said the new tracker is meant to show whether the system is finally getting safer, more reliable and less prone to breakdowns.

The Modern Skies site is designed to monitor more than 10,000 projects nationwide and will be updated monthly with summaries of major work and a progress tracker showing what has been completed and what remains underway. It also includes an interactive map that lets users sort projects by city, state, airport, ZIP code or congressional district, a feature that could give lawmakers and travelers a clearer way to measure how the work is advancing across the country.

Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy said the effort has been hampered by years of opacity and promised that Americans would “get a front row view” of the modernization push. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford called it “the most significant transformation of America’s air traffic control system in generations,” adding that the agency wanted the public to see how the money was being spent and what progress was being made.

The rollout comes with real pressure behind it. Bedford told a Senate hearing Tuesday that the current system handles more than 18 million flights and more than one billion passenger movements a year, a scale he said has pushed the network to its limits. The FAA says the overhaul, funded through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, is intended to replace aging radar, software, hardware and telecommunications systems that federal officials say have been obsolete for years.

The department’s May 8, 2025 plan called for replacing 618 radars, 25,000 radios and 475 voice switches, installing six new air traffic control centers for the first time since the 1960s, and upgrading runway-safety systems at 200 airports. FAA officials say the target is to implement a brand-new system by the end of 2028.

The stakes are not abstract. The department has blamed the January 2023 NOTAM outage for the first nationwide ground stop since Sept. 11, 2001, underscoring how a failure in old infrastructure can ripple across the country in minutes. In April 2026, Duffy said the department had already replaced almost 50 percent of copper wires in the telecommunications system, installed digital voice switches at 40 locations, added surface awareness systems at 54 airports and transitioned 17 control towers to electronic flight strips, though he said some workstreams were behind schedule.

The price tag is still climbing. Duffy and FAA leaders have said the modernization effort will cost more than the initial $12.5 billion, with another roughly $20 billion still being sought to finish the job. That makes the tracker more than a progress page. It is now one of the few public yardsticks for judging whether the government can deliver a decades-overdue aviation upgrade without repeating the delays and outages that made it necessary.