Alaska Air Group has outlined a vision for overhauling the USA’s creaking air traffic control (ATC) infrastructure, calling for changes across high-density hubs and remote Alaskan and Hawaiian airports alike.
The Seattle-headquartered airline company – parent of Alaska Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines and Horizon Air – framed the country’s airspace issues in a 26 September white paper as part of a long-term trend of aircraft technology developing faster than ATC technology.
Changing that dynamic is an enormous challenge. Fixing immediate deficiencies and developing future technologies simultaneously will require substantial workforce development, equipment and infrastructure initiatives.
Not to mention, associated costs are enormous. The US government recently pledged to overhaul the national ATC system with some $12.5 billion in funding. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has said his department will seek a total of more than $30 billion through 2028 for aviation safety upgrades.
Notably, the Federal Aviation Administration is now accepting proposals from companies vying to manage the agency’s latest modernisation effort. The FAA plans to hire one company to oversee the project, and to choose the contractor before late next month.
While calling the country’s aviation safety infrastructure a “marvel”, Alaska Air maintains that billions of dollars in modernisation efforts over the past several decades have “mostly failed to keep pace with the growth of aviation, technological innovation and the needs of the travelling public”.
“In 2025, the air travel time between certain US cities has grown longer relative to the 1980s despite having modern jets,” it says.
Allowing an already-aged and obsolete ATC system falling into further disrepair, with worsening inefficiencies and safety risks, could result in ”erosion of American leadership in global aviation”, the airline group warns.
On the other hand, addressing persistent technology issues across the national airspace system (NAS) would reduce delay times and time spent on taxiways, boost operational efficiency, make airline schedules more dependable and reduce high workloads on ATC workers, Alaska Air says.
Touting its own first-hand experience on the matter, Alaska Air says that Alaska and Hawaiian operate in busy Northeast hubs such as John F Kennedy International and Newark Liberty International, along with West Coast strongholds in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Honolulu.
Subsidiary airlines also fly to remote areas in Alaska and the Pacific, including the Aleutian island of Adak and Pago Pago, the American Samo capital some 2,600nm (4,184km) southwest of Honolulu.
”These are often communities with neither control towers nor radars and minimal ATC services,” the company says. ”We also serve many airports ’in between’ such as Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Boise, Missoula, Lihue and Nashville, which have ATC infrastructure such as control towers with varying hours and radar services.”
ERRATIC AIR TRAFFIC
The most immediate needs include ATC staffing and infrastructure improvements. Alaska Air acknowledges that the USA has recently taken steps to boost hiring of qualified controllers; Duffy said recently that the FAA is on track to hire some 2,200 controllers by year-end.
Presently, worker shortages are helping create “erratic” air traffic flows in busy corridors throughout the USA, with pilots struggling to maintain safe distances between aircraft and long wait times on the ground as terminal gates become available.
”The present lack of ability to dynamically reorganise traffic flows in real time generates higher workloads, schedule uncertainty, lost time and greater societal costs,” the airline company says. “Accordingly, we propose improved system predictability as an explicit goal that Americans can noticeably experience.”
Creating more-predictable air traffic would allow airlines to schedule more departures and greater flight frequencies, Alaska says. “We envision a system in which every flight moves more efficiently.”
In one specific recommendation, Alaska Air encourages making greater use of aircraft performance-based navigation (PBN) systems to create more-efficient and precisely timed routes untethered from ground-based reference systems that communicate with radio towers.
“It’s a better road system in the sky,” it says. “The FAA should ensure technologies like PBN are utilised to achieve safety and efficiency.”
Alaska also suggests that the FAA should “fully exercise its procurement authority” by integrating off-the-shelf flow-management tools already in use today, and to use AI-powered tools in a “full-scale simulation” of the NAS in partnership with airlines, industry groups and other stakeholders.
”It would be easy for government and industry to miss this moment of transformation, given the monumental nature of the task at hand to fix the fundamentals,” Alaska says. “Let’s not allow that to happen.”
