The federal government has selected two companies to spearhead the replacement of 612 outdated radar systems across the nation, dating back to the 1980s. This initiative is a key component of a multibillion-dollar effort to modernize the U.S. air traffic control system.

On Monday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced that contractors RTX and Indra, a Spanish company, are tasked with updating the radar systems by the summer of 2028. The plan is to complete this overhaul by the end of 2028, aligning with the closing phase of President Donald Trump’s current term.

“Our radar network is antiquated and urgently needs an upgrade. Many units have surpassed their expected service life, making them costly to maintain and increasingly hard to support,” stated FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford.

The FAA has been allocating the majority of its $3 billion equipment budget just to keep the old, fragile system running, which in some locations still relies on floppy disks. Given the age of the equipment, many components are no longer produced, compelling the FAA to occasionally search for spare parts on platforms like eBay.

Last spring, technical failures twice disrupted radar operations for air traffic controllers at Newark Liberty International Airport, resulting in thousands of flight cancellations and delays at this major hub.

Redundancy in the system helps keep flights safe, but there have been a number of occasions when both the primary and backup systems failed, as happened in the Philadelphia facility directing planes into and out of the Newark airport.

The FAA didn’t immediately provide an estimate of the cost of the new radar systems that will replace 14 different existing radar systems in use across the country and will simplify maintenance and repairs.

The FAA has already committed more than $6 billion of the $12.5 billion that Congress approved to pay for the overhaul, but Duffy has said that another $20 billion will be needed to complete the project. The agency has already replaced more than one-third of the outdated copper wires the system was relying on with modern connections like fiber optic lines, and it hired a national security contractor named Peraton to oversee the work.