The Trump administration wants to fix air traffic control by throwing an indeterminate amount of money at upgrading aging technology. Their plan takes the approach laid out in the opening to The Hitchhikers’ Guide To The Galaxy.

This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy laid out many of the ways that U.S. air traffic control is a technological mess. So he wants to spend a secret amount of money fixing it. That’s exactly the approach the FAA has taken for more than 40 years without fixing it.

A review of more than 20 government oversight reports dating back almost half a century shows the agency has repeatedly struggled to modernize its air-traffic systems.

The FAA’s work to overhaul air-traffic control traces back to 1981, when it estimated the effort would cost $12 billion over 10 years. The Government Accountability Office, a congressional watchdog, twice designated the overhaul a “high-risk” project in the 1990s. By 2003, two decades and $35 billion after beginning the effort, the FAA’s cost estimate had ballooned to $51 billion and was 16 years behind schedule. The same year, the FAA began transforming its radar-based system to draw on satellite navigation to expand its capacity and improve safety.

There is no proposal to fix the FAA itself, creating any accountability or performance metrics. There’s a leadership and cultural problem at the Air Traffic Organization that designs in failure. ‘Moving little green pieces of paper around’ isn’t going to fix that.

Instead, the plan is to throw a lot of money at an agency that’s been unable to deliver for as long as I’ve been alive. What is their procurement process like?

The first step in the process is to establish system requirements. Having been intimately involved in a few of these efforts, this process is very much in need of improvement. FAA has designated random FAA controllers to establish requirements, without extensive knowledge of the system they are replacing and with no training on how to develop requirements to hand off to engineering teams. This process lacks value engineering as an essential part of the process. The result is gold-plating ATC [air traffic control] requirements, and sometimes demanding capabilities that are not cost-effective or technologically feasible.

…engineering programs run by non-engineers, operations run by non-operational people, logistics run by non-logisticians. The systems engineering that FAA once had has been destroyed…

…The last failed attempt by FAA to solve the surveillance conundrum was named SENSR. Now there is a new program called ANSR (Aircraft Non-cooperative Surveillance Radar), which has little chance of being deployed in the next 15 years, even if it is fully funded by Congress.

Here’s Air Transport Association (now Airlines 4 America) veteran and former FAA consultant Gary Church, via the inestimable Bob Poole,

The problem with FAA procurement is that initial failures lead to more and more convoluted processes that contribute nothing but add layers of procurement complexity. A big one is a cost-benefit analysis that wants not an 80% solution but a 99% solution, which takes more and more time to acquire data and analyze. While doing this, your 18 months to make a relevant decision becomes three, four, or five years. In that time, all the technology and assumptions change. If you can’t make a cost/benefit procurement decision within 18 months, you have lost the window and any opportunity of making a good decision. Second, based on analyzing FAA’s process, I conclude that you will never get to a successful procurement following the details prescribed in the FAA documentation…Every notable FAA procurement failure over the years has just added complexity and delay to cost analysis and systems engineering processes, until today they are virtually unworkable: you just can’t get a product out the door.

We need to split out the FAA’s Air Traffic Organization which provides air traffic control services from the regulatory function of the agency. The FAA shouldn’t be regulating itself. That leads to zero accountability. That’s an ICAO best practice followed by most of the world. I worry that alone isn’t enough (government rail Amtrak has a separate regulator). The NavCanada model is better, with an independent stakeholder nonprofit, which can issue bonds for long-term capital needs and pay them off with user fees. It’s no coincidence they’re decades ahead of the FAA in technology.