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> its implementation of a “NextGen” air traffic control system to replace the current version may not be completed until 2034, even though the project was started in 2003.

Governments (and a lot of businesses) like to look at software as a one-time purchase, but it's really better too look at it as a liability and an ongoing cost. It'd be better to have a team make continuous, incremental improvements to the system than have "NextGen" last-gen replacement vaporware.

+1, the "strangler" pattern is the best (and often only) way to replace/update systems.

0) no new logic in the old system (stop the bleeding)

1) incrementally wrap old system interfaces with new system

2) proxy to old system and dark launch new system

3) monitor / confirm correctness

4) cut-over

There are examples of both. Firmware and embedded software usually is a one time purchase. Tax software requires ongoing updates. FAA software would fall somewhere in between.
They like to give contracts to connected outsiders so that they can take care of their friends and take the blame away. 30 years? quoting the venerable Sir Humphrey Appleby:

"Precisely. Months of fruitful work. Leading to a mature and responsible conclusion."

Since it takes 30 years it must be a responsible piece of software, polished to the bone.

Software is a liability, a product is an asset.
This is a classic system at 99.9% capacity - there’s no slack to take up issues or do anything but run at, well, 99.9%.

And without something like a major disaster, it’ll likely continue to get worse and worse.

Air travel is far too subsidized by the public and I can think of few worse applications of public funds save maybe sports stadiums. It's a huge waste of energy, pollution, human labor...

Rail is incredibly efficient, and there's a reason China has been building high speed rail as fast as it can.

To all the "it would never work here" people: we used to be a nation of rail travel, where you could walk or bike or take a taxi to the local trolley/train/bus station, take a train to where you needed to go.

All that was systematically ripped apart by the auto industry either directly or indirectly. There is no reason whatsoever we can't work our way back, especially given how much faster and easier construction of a railway line is now.

I'd LOVE some proper high speed rail across the US but EWR is also huge for international flights. A good rail network would at least help getting to/from their for it but that still leaves a good amount of flights that make no sense to dump.
> Air travel is far too subsidized by the public

Don't most of FAA's funds come from taxes on air travel? And around half of Americans travel by air every year, so it's not a niche service.

> Rail is incredibly efficient

As a European, I don't understand the fetishization of railway. These are two different means of transportation with two different use cases, with tiny overlap between them.

> I can think of few worse applications of public funds save maybe sports stadiums.

Californians can.

Subsidies to the movie industry, plumbing run to waterless urinals, bullet trains between farm towns, ...

> Rail is incredibly efficient

If you have the density to justify it.

There is a case to be made for enhancing rail transit in the eastern seaboard and maybe parts of the Midwest, but America is too large and sparse to justify rail transit at scale.

It makes more sense to concentrate on rail infra for freight transit and work on revamping our existing rail freight infra.

> there's a reason China has been building high speed rail as fast as it can

China stopped subsidizing HSR during the COVID recession. It costs the exact same as a flight ticket now [0] due to high debt [1] (excluding the Beijing-Shanghai track, which actually can justify usage).

Most Chinese use normal rail for intercity transit, but this is easier to justify given the density and ease of land acquisition.

But even then, China began slowing down railway investment and construction since 2018 [2][3], and started calibrating towards air transit [4] as part of a commercial aviation push [5]

[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/business/china-bullet-tra...

[1] - https://www.caixinglobal.com/2019-01-29/zhao-jian-whats-not-...

[2] - https://www.caixinglobal.com/2018-01-02/china-railway-corp-s...

[3] - https://www.caixinglobal.com/2021-03-30/china-looks-to-slow-...

[4] - https://www.caixinglobal.com/2021-03-25/smaller-cities-reach...

[5] - https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/comac-jet...

i flew delta out of ewr last week. the pilot announced over speaker that air traffic control was serializing take offs on one runway to avoid problems. we sat on the tarmac for two hours waiting our turn. that was on top of another hour delay for our flight arriving due to this policy.

delta doesn’t reimburse for missed connections claiming air traffic control policies are outside of their control.

it reminds me of a dev team i worked with once which used single threaded memcache as a way to serialize inbound requests to a server with improper locking logic inside.

> delta doesn’t reimburse for missed connections claiming air traffic control policies are outside of their control.

AFAIK if it's one booking on the same airline or a codeshare they are required to rebook you. If you planned a "connection" which is two single flights with different airlines you don't get any legal protections. This isn't just Delta, no airline will reimburse you for missing a flight you didn't book through them

What do you mean delta doesn’t reimburse connections? I believe they would still be responsible for getting you to your final destination
>delta doesn’t reimburse for missed connections claiming air traffic control policies are outside of their control.

Reimburse? They'll put you on another connecting flight of your choice as any airline does. I did this on a Delta flight with a missed connection due to delay just last week. They also automatically upgraded me to Comfort+ at no extra charge for the inconvenience.

Sounds like it's time to drop Delta
I'm in no way qualified to comment on the details of the issue outlined here (though I did get stuck babysitting a friend's kids for many extra hours due to a 6hr delay on said friend's flight into EWR a few weeks ago). For anyone who lives far enough north and west of EWR though, I highly recommend trying either the Allentown or Scranton/Wilkes-Barre airports. I've moved my business travel to Scranton 100% and have been loving it. There are more restrictions on flight times, and basically everything needs a connection, but it more than makes up for any time I would have lost due to sinkhole traffic on I-80 and the EWR parking shuttles. It's amazing to park and be at the security line basically 3 minutes later.
Flew out of ABE most of my life, still an excellent airport, but it’s best to be aware that any connections through EWR or PHL will be by bus.
> To save money, the FAA elected not to build a new STARS server in Philadelphia to support the move. A new server alone would require tens of millions of dollars, as well as installation of new internet and power infrastructure.

> Instead, it elected to send a “mirror feed” of telemetry from the STARS servers at N90, traveling over 130 miles of commercial copper telecom lines, with fiber optics to follow by 2030.

> The annoyances of traditional cable internet — frequent lag, dropped sessions — are probably familiar to those who stream video or play games online. But for air traffic controllers, even the smallest service disruptions can become dangerous.

So LOL what, they just ... piped it over the Internet? Also can someone make sense of this "new server" costing millions of dollars? Presumably it's not the cost of a server, which is orders and orders of magnitude less than that?

Aerospace is hard.

An ATCS like STARS needs to feed from multiple different OT and IT sources like radars, weather stations, other TRACONs, etc and is implemented in it's own airgapped environment.

It can get very pricy very quick. On top of that, the FAA's budget has been sclerotic for decades now after the 1980s era union action and the 1990s era national cost cutting.

And finally, it is a political organization, and NATCA is a fairly prominent union within the AFL-CIO, and could make the lives of NJ representatives hell for pushing reassignment out of Newark.

I doubt that 130 miles of copper is the public Internet. It’s presumably some legacy telecom system that depends on a bunch of generally fairly well made but thoroughly obsolete hardware.

Keep in mind that Ethernet over copper is only specified to ~100 meters. Long distance copper networks have been obsolete for a few decades.

Why not pipe it over the internet? A few redundant ISPs at the endpoints should be as reliable as a private run of fiber or T1 lines or whatever bespoke solution they think they need?
Nah, probably on leased lines like t1s/t3s. Airport telecom infra isnt always the best.
When they say "server" it means the (cheap) hardware and the (very expensive) software to drive these complex and critical systems.
A "Server" is just layman's speak for that big room with all the noise and blinky lights. Including all the hardware, networking and software that goes with it. Of course you're not going to run critical infra on a single server :)

Though I have to admit I have seen government operations where the "server" was an old dell optiplex desktop lying on its side in a broom closet without ventilation, a post-it with "IT SERVER DON'T TURN OFF", a spiderweb of cables running through the closet and the "server" fans screaming for air trying to keep everything cool in the enclosed space. I'm not kidding.

I mean, I know, government. Small local welfare-related org. Shoestring budget. Sure, that sucks. But at least you can make sure it's tidy and the cabling doesn't look like shit. Jeez. I didn't imagine I'd still see that in this century. Do people no longer take pride in their job? They hadn't even activated the "AC Power on" in the BIOS so after electrical maintenance they had to wait for the "engineer" to press the on button again.

What are leased lines?
> pp. lag

> hold all traffic

> rdy?

> gogogo

Need more trains.
It's amazing, really. You hear about "government overspending" all the time. You actually look into something in any detail and what you discover is a consistent pattern of underspending. Call it mismanagement if you want, but it is consistently what we, as votes, and the executive, ask them to do.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I was a contractor for HHS for a year or so. When I started, there was a server farm built for a contract that was powered up and maintained; never used, it was broken up and sold for surplus. Just before I left, HHS thought they would like that program again, so us US taxpayers bought another tranche of computers to power up. I don't know the end of the story.

I could type more, but it would be a long and boring story.

The general pattern I see is that operating spending is too high while capital spending is too low.
The US overspends on military and underspends on most other things. Not sure when this will ever change. Only when it has to I guess.
Have been many billions of dollars spent over the years to "modernize" air traffic control. If my recollection is correct, most of it ended up being wasted.

The current administration is asking for a lot of money to try to fix it again

Most people see a number $6 Trillion and something breaks inside them.

What they don't realize is maintaining infrastructure is expensive.

Sure there are a lot of inefficiencies with need to be fixed, but you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Sadly, such is society, and this is a problem that happens everywhere - be they democracies or authoritarian states.

> you discover is a consistent pattern of underspending

No, what you discover is a pattern of wasted spending. Then they ask for more money to actually get the job done despite all the waste.

People try to solve this by privatizing certain things, figuring that competition will help efficiency. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Maybe we need competing governments, and whichever government is more efficient gets to rule. Seriously: Add a second FAA at some test airports, see if they can do better, with the understanding that if they can't, they get shut down.

It's like tech debt. It's an ongoing cost in a one and done environment, it's hard to see problems from the outside until there's catastrophic failure, and if there's a slow niggling annoyance of things getting worse over time the point where people notice enough to care is usually past the point of needing a refactor. So we get underspending where it matters, overspending where it doesn't, and the solution is always a redo.
Came across this post, which perfectly encapsulates a sort of pathological inversion of sunk-cost fallacy, where some people I encounter would happily let infrastructure rot and countless people suffer if it saves them pennies on their taxes, and are incapable of re-evaluating their position because “taxes bad” has somehow become such an ingrained/religious value that anything else is unconsciously and immediately rejected no matter the consequences.

https://old.reddit.com/r/goodnews/comments/1kuaasx/i_voted_f...

>>I posted this somewhere else ages ago, feel it's relevant

>I remember having a conversation with my ex's sister and their mum a few years ago, around election time. I try to not talk politics with people because it's a fast way to lose friends, but the topic came up between my ex and them over dinner and I just listened in.

>I remember them saying that the only thing they're interested in is tax cuts. More money for them. I had to chime in and ask what about the NHS, what about funding schools? They said they didn't care because they had private healthcare through their jobs (finance), so they don't need the NHS. The mum said her kids are through school so she doesn't care about funding schools, and the sister said she'll be sending her kids to private school one day. I was pretty gobsmacked at the brazen selfishness of it, and asked what if they lose their jobs - and therefore their private health care - or become unable to work, what if when you have kids you can't afford private school? Neither of them could grasp this hypothetical... it was as if I was speaking another language to them. They were just like 'but we do have jobs.' And what if you didn't? 'But we do.' It was just circular and they couldn't see themselves in any situation other than the one they were currently in.

>I can quite see why empathy is a hard concept for right wingers to grasp, it was like they just simply couldn't understand the concept. They weren't stupid either, and nor were they rich - the mum worked in admin for a finance company in the city, and the sister was being paid by the same company (mum got her in the door) to train as an accountant.

>I think about those two every now and then when I can't understand how the other side thinks. Because it seems we do literally think very differently.

Don't generalize. There was 0 underspending at the Department of Education or USAID.
An interim solution would be to force carriers to upsize their jets to reduce total flights per day. Force any carrier who has wide-body aircraft to use them on domestic routes. heavily limit or ban the use of smaller commuter jets (replace them with 737s with fewer total flights). I'm sure they won't be happy about it, but it's a solution that could be implemented overnight and the larger carriers would have no problem adjusting. smaller ones could sell their slots or lease larger aircraft.
I don't understand this sentence:

> Instead, it elected to send a “mirror feed” of telemetry from the STARS servers at N90, traveling over 130 miles of commercial copper telecom lines, with fiber optics to follow by 2030.

This does not make any sense. If they would really transmit data over a 130 miles copper line (which I doubt even still exist, especially not commercial ones), we would be talking rates in the low Mbit/s. I suspect the situation is that the "last mile" of the center is served by copper connections, not good either but by far not as bad as a 130 miles copper connection.

EDIT: I should add if they really would have a link running on copper lines it would have repeaters, which would be sitting in datacenters. In New Jersey there would by 1000s of km of dark fiber floating around, so it would be trivial to convert at least the majority of the link to fiber.

Telephone providers lease "dry loop" lines for point-to-point signalling.

I've used them for telemetry systems with acoustic modems on both ends.

Also for sending audio between broadcast studios. I recall that it was priced by bandwidth (in the literal, analog, sense), e.g.: 5kHz (~AM radio) was less expensive than 15kHz (~FM radio). For comparison: A normal phone call is 3kHz.

So yes, copper and repeaters. But very inexpensive and quick to provision. :)

It would have been easier and cheaper to raise the salaries of the Long Island employees.
It turns out trying to run an airport like twitter is a bad idea, who knew
We had a 9/11's worth of death EVERY DAY for the first TWO YEARS of covid

Then a 9/11's worth of death EVERY WEEK for the next TWO YEARS of covid

We still have a 9/11's worth of death EVERY MONTH in 2025

Personally I don't want anyone to die in a plane crash

But apparently a hundred million other people do not care anymore about others dying needlessly

So factor that into your next flight if you are taking your life into your own hands?

What's stopping us from implementing holo style 3d displays like in the movies? Star-Trek etc. Are we not there yet?? alternatively, what about VR? we could virtually project the traffic controllers out into space like silver-surfer or ironman right(pov of course)? I'm not an expert, but it seems we need a better UX/UI right?
> but it seems we need a better UX/UI right?

Wrong.

It's the fact that the FAA has $5.2B in outstanding repairs but only $1.7B allocated for repair.

On top of that, the GS pay scale penalizes federal employees in high CoL areas.

Both are very difficult problems to solve, as the former means dramatically increasing the FAA's budget (which is tiny for the scope of responsibility it has across North America), and the latter means completely reforming the General Schedule.

On top of that, Congress constantly meddles with the FAA and DoT in general because it's the easiest way to get some quick wins for constituents.

The FAA has been working on modernizing air traffic control, but that project won't be completed til 2030 at the earliest.

Furthermore, the Northeast is a uniquely congested airspace with the massive number of airports and passengers.