FAA chief promises AI-powered ATC overhaul will succeed where NextGen failed

Regulator has a ‘great plan’ that will not suffer the same fate as the troubled predecessor programme, Bedford says.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) chief took to the stage on NBAA-BACE’s opening day to insist his agency’s air traffic control (ATC) modernisation will actually work, despite the agency’s patchy track record on delivering upgrades.

Administrator Bryan Bedford also defended a recent decision prohibiting several Cessna Citation models from being flown by single pilots.

But fixing the USA’s sagging ATC infrastructure was at the forefront of Bedford’s mind.

“There’s massive inefficiencies that can be solved. There’s huge gaps of availability that even our controllers can’t see,” Bedford says.

“But when we make [controllers] smarter, they will be able to see where those gaps are and accommodate these requests.”

He cites technologies including the FAA’s new AI-enabled flight management tool SMART, which studies weather, traffic flows, flight routes and controller staffing to help predict bottlenecks and prevent delays.

The FAA has long managed airspace overcrowding by implementing ground-delay and ground-stop programmes – “ham-handed ways of sorting traffic out”, says Bedford.

AI-enabled systems can “solve all of those math problems and tell us where the conflicts are before the plane even leaves the ground”, he adds. “It’s a huge improvement for business aviation.”

The Trump administration launched its ATC overhaul in 2025 shortly after the deadly midair collision near Washington, DC. Congress kick-started the programme with $12.5 billion to replace radars, voice switches and radios, and to swap copper wires for fibre-optic cables.

But the FAA says it needs another $30 billion to finish the job: $10 billion for systems, $10 billion for facilities and the balance to upgrade airports.

“We actually have a great plan,” Bedford says.

He describes the FAA’s prior and delay-plagued “NextGen” modernisation effort — a programme spanning two decades — as misguided and mismanaged.

“Most federal programs, like NextGen, get a big slug of cash, and then… it just goes into the ether,” Bedford says. “We sort of got hoodwinked into that for 20 years.”

Bedford then turned to the FAA’s September decision to revoke an exemption allowing Citation 500s, 550s and 560s to be flown with only one pilot. Those jets are certificated under the agency’s Part 25 regulations, which otherwise require two pilots.

Bedford says the FAA granted the exemptions decades ago on the belief and condition that single-pilot flights are as safe as dual-pilot flights.

That standard has not been reached, he says. “Not just FAA, but the [National Transportation Safety Board] identified that the accident record on a single-pilot Cessna-exemption aircraft is over two times what dual-pilot operations are. Those are facts,” he adds.

“We can no longer say that exemption is reaching an equivalent level of safety.”

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