US Senator Ed Markey is calling for a public hearing to investigate Elon Musk’s recent statements about the safety of the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) air traffic control technology.
The announcement comes after the FAA said it is considering canceling a $2.4 billion contract with Verizon in favor of Elon Musk’s Starlink.
In a letter to Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz and Ranking Member Maria Cantwell, published on his website on March 3, 2025, Senator Markey said that “Musk’s comments could understandably cause panic among air travelers,” adding that the public is more anxious about air travel due to several recent aircraft crashes.
“Although the FAA’s information technology systems need modernization, Musk’s alarmist rhetoric appears extreme,” Markey wrote. “If he has discovered new vulnerabilities in the FAA’s Air Traffic Control system, the Committee should know about such information immediately.”
Musk holds two key roles as the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and X, as well as being a senior adviser to US President Donald Trump. However, this raises concerns about a potential conflict of interest in the awarding of certain government contracts.
On March 3, 2025, Sharice Davids, a member of the US House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s Aviation Subcommittee, stated that “the administration must ensure federal contracts are awarded through a fair and transparent process, not at the whim of a billionaire with political ties to those in power.”
On February 27, 2025, Elon Musk said on X that “the Verizon communication system to air traffic control is breaking down very rapidly.” He added that the FAA’s evaluation indicates “single digit months to catastrophic failure”.
Musk later admitted that he made a mistake when he claimed Verizon managed the FAA’s communications system, updating his statement on X to clarify that “the ancient system that is rapidly declining in capability was made L3Harris,” while “the new system that is not yet operational is from Verizon.”
Concluding the letter, Senator Markey wrote: “If Musk cannot provide evidence of his claims, it raises serious questions about whether he is using his role as a senior government official to enrich his company SpaceX, currently competing for FAA contracts. In either case, the Commerce Committee has a responsibility to immediately hold a public hearing to investigate Musk’s claims on behalf of the American public.”
1 comment
Hey Senator Markey, FYI
A screenshot of an article by Brandon Vigliarolo of the Register on 24 September 2024
Ancient US air traffic control systems won’t get a tech refresh before 2030
If they don’t crash first, say government auditors
Brandon Vigliarolo
Tue 24 Sep 2024 // 17:15 UTC
Updated The Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) air traffic control (ATC) systems are perilously out of date, but don’t expect replacements anytime soon, says the US Government Accountability Office (GAO).
In a report released Monday, the GAO said that 51 of the FAA’s 138 ATC systems – more than a third – were unsustainable due to a lack of parts, shortfalls in funding to sustain them, or a lack of technology refresh funding to replace them. A further 54 systems were described as “potentially unsustainable” for similar reasons, with the added caveat that tech refresh funding was available to them.
“FAA has 64 ongoing investments aimed at modernizing 90 of the 105 unsustainable and potentially unsustainable systems,” the GAO said in its report. “However, the agency has been slow to modernize the most critical and at-risk systems.”
The report said the seemingly perilous status of 17 systems was “especially concerning” as these are deemed to have critical operational impact at the same time as being unsustainable and having extended completion dates – the first of them won’t be modernized until 2030 at the earliest. Others aren’t planned to be complete until 2035, and four of the 17 “most critical and at-risk FAA ATC systems” have no modernization plans at all.
faa-critical-atc-systems
https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/24/us_air_traffic_control_system_upgrade/
Take a look at this link, it’s pathetic!
A list of 17 critical at-risk FAA ATC systems
Of the systems on the list, two are more than 40 years old, and a further seven have been in service for more than 30 years.