By Doyinsola Oladipo
NEWARK, New Jersey, Aug 11 (Reuters) – U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on Tuesday he is working to fix telecom issues flagged after a military helicopter carrying President Donald Trump last week came close to a passenger jet departing Reagan Washington National Airport.
The incident raised questions about why the passenger airplane was allowed to depart while Marine One was nearby, a time when commercial traffic is typically halted.
The United States has been wrestling in recent years with aviation incidents that have raised concerns about safety and the strain on understaffed air traffic control operations.
Following a January 2025 crash between a military helicopter and a commercial jet that killed 67 people, the Federal Aviation Administration barred mixed helicopter and jet traffic around the airport.
“There have been some telecom issues,” Duffy told reporters at Newark Liberty International Airport, adding that the issues were at the staff level between the Marine One team and the FAA. “That’s been now elevated,” he said, adding that he is working with the FAA on a solution with the White House.
Duffy and FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford spoke to media at the New Jersey airport at an event marking the installation of a new surface movement radar to improve runway safety. Duffy said the radar provides air traffic controllers with better technology to see airplanes and vehicles on the ground.
“It’s a more resilient system,” he said. “It allows controllers on a dark night or controllers in bad weather, if they can’t see out of the tower and see what’s happening on the tarmac,” Duffy added. In March, an Air Canada Express jet collided with a fire truck while landing at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, killing both pilots, injuring dozens and closing the airport.
Bedford said the FAA will deploy 53 surface movement radars at 44 of the nation’s busiest airports amid broader modernization efforts expected to be completed in 2028.
FAA HIRING CONTROLLERS
The FAA is hiring thousands of air traffic controllers and spending billions to replace outdated air traffic control telecom infrastructure and radar surveillance systems after a series of failures, including significant outages covering Newark and Washington traffic.
About 4,000 controllers are undergoing training and the FAA has hired 2,000 more who will receive training soon, according to a Department of Transportation spokesperson.
About 75 candidates out of the thousands of applications collected during the department’s campaign to hire video game players are receiving training.
Bedford has said greater aviation investment is necessary with traffic expected to grow over the next two decades.
“We’re going to move a billion passengers this year — a billion on nearly 18 million flight trajectories across the country,” Bedford said. “Over the next 20 years, we’ll see that double to 2 billion passengers.”
Duffy said he would like an additional $20 billion, but would settle for $10 billion for airport towers, at a time when he is fielding regular complaints about infrastructure with leaky roofs built during the 1960s and 1970s.
“Hopefully by the end of this year we get it,” Duffy said.
The FAA said by the end of 2028, airports will have 5,000 new high-speed network connections on fiber, satellite and wireless, 27,000 new radios and 612 state-of-the-art radars.
The Department of Transportation still plans to release a web video series on Duffy’s U.S. road trip that corporate donors paid for.
In June, six Democratic senators sought a government probe into the road trip.
(Reporting by Doyinsola Oladipo in Newark, additional reporting and writing by Allison Lampert in Montreal; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Rod Nickel)
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