The federal government has selected RTX and the Spanish firm Indra to replace 612 radar systems used by air traffic controllers nationwide, the Trump administration said Monday.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and the Federal Aviation Administration said the contractors are expected to complete the replacement by the summer of 2028, as the administration targets finishing the overhaul by the end of 2028 near the conclusion of President Donald Trump’s current term.
FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said in a statement that the agency’s radar network is “outdated and long overdue for replacement.” He added that many units have exceeded their intended service life, making them “increasingly expensive to maintain and difficult to support.”
The FAA has been spending most of its $3 billion equipment budget keeping the older system running, with some of the equipment no longer manufactured, the report said. The agency sometimes has to search for spare parts on eBay, according to the same account.
The need for replacement has been tied to failures that disrupted operations at major airports. The radar was knocked out twice last spring for controllers managing planes around Newark Liberty International Airport, the FAA said, and those problems led to thousands of cancellations and delays at the hub.
The FAA also cited how redundancy is intended to protect against outages, while noting that there have been occasions when both primary and backup systems failed. One example described was a Philadelphia facility that directed planes into and out of Newark during an incident when both systems went down.
The FAA did not immediately provide an estimate of the cost of the new radar systems that will replace 14 different existing radar systems currently in use across the country, which the agency said will simplify maintenance and repairs.
The agency has committed more than $6 billion of the $12.5 billion Congress approved for the overhaul, Duffy said. He also said an additional $20 billion would be needed to complete the work.
The report said the FAA has already replaced more than one-third of the outdated copper wires the system relied on with modern connections such as fiber optic lines. It also said the FAA hired Peraton, described as a national security contractor, to oversee the radar modernization effort.