U.S. aviation technology is ‘an embarrassment,' former exec says

Here's what one former top official says must change.

Transcript

00:00There are two things that are imperative that we do right away in order to fix the challenges that

00:05we're facing right now. The first is for Congress to allocate adequate budget to the FAA to begin

00:12merely arresting the dissent of the technology at the FAA. It then needs to provide budget to

00:20begin putting in a new system, a state-of-the-art system that is not an embarrassment to the United

00:26States of America. The second thing they need is leadership, leaders who will take advantage of

00:34the special procurement and hiring authority that the FAA has that's different from what any other

00:41government agency has, which will be necessary in order to accelerate the deployment of this new

00:47technology. I will say that Secretary Duffy is the most engaged Secretary of Transportation with

00:55Aviation of any Secretary that we have seen. And he is completely on top of this problem. He

01:04understands it. He gets it. He spent a lot of time at the FAA. And he is right now advocating on the

01:12Hill for the budget that he needs, which has two critical elements to the budget that the Secretary

01:19is seeking. One is merely the size of the budget. But the second is to create the budget structurally

01:26so that it's not subject to constant interruptions every time there is a threat, even, of a government

01:34shutdown, even one that doesn't occur.