By Allison Lampert and David Shepardson
MONTREAL/WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has just two candidates vying to become the project manager of a multi-billion dollar effort to overhaul air traffic control in the United States, the agency’s top official told Reuters.
The FAA says it plans to pick a winner by the end of October to manage the contract. Earlier in the process, sources told Reuters, multiple companies were expected to apply.
The aging U.S. air traffic control system is badly in need of overhaul and routinely suffers serious technology outages. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has said the FAA has been forced at times to go to eBay to get spare parts. A government report last year said 51 of its 138 air traffic control systems are unsustainable.
Congress in July approved a $12.5 billion plan to overhaul the nation’s aging air traffic control system, and boost controller hiring following decades of complaints over airport congestion and flight delays. Duffy has said he is going to push for an additional $19 billion from Congress for air traffic control reform.
Peraton, a national security company owned by Veritas Capital, confirmed it submitted a bid to manage the project. Parsons, a technology provider in national security and global infrastructure markets, also confirmed on Wednesday it has bid with IBM.
In April, President Donald Trump said there were five companies that could do the work and suggested that Raytheon Technologies and IBM could get the contract.
One senior source said he was not surprised that two companies applied given the difficulty of reforming air traffic control that has more than 100 separate computer systems, as well as aging equipment and outdated telecommunications links. But he added that he believed the FAA was capable of carrying out the modernization project and has support from industry.
Bids for the “prime integrator” job, the largest ever overhaul of U.S. air traffic control infrastructure, were due on Sunday. The integrator will have a project management role. The FAA sought proposals in August for an integrator, but Parsons had announced its interest in June.
“I think we’ve got two very good candidates for integrator,” FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said on Tuesday night in an interview on the sidelines of the U.N. aviation agency’s triennial assembly in Montreal.
Bedford added that many of the larger prime contractors that the FAA works with ultimately decided not to partner. “They just figured they were going to go with whoever the winner was.”
“We have a process that we’re going to run and ultimately, we’re going to bring that up to Secretary Duffy and to President Trump,” Bedford added. “We’ll give them all the facts and they’ll pick the one they feel most comfortable with.”
Sources said the Trump administration faces the challenge of carrying out a major overhaul of a highly complex system within four years at a time when the FAA has lost experienced personnel.
“We need to rebuild a new system with true redundancies that can be tested,” Duffy said in a phone interview. “We can’t have lines go down…. We need new software to run our airspace and make it more efficient.”
Flight operations at two Dallas-area airports returned to normal on Saturday after failures by a telecommunications company led to more than 2,000 flight disruptions.
(Reporting by Allison Lampert in Montreal and David Shepardson in Washington; Editing by Chris Sanders and Aurora Ellis)
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