OpEd – Secretary Duffy’s $12.5 Billion Air Traffic Control Overhaul Must Include UAS and AAM Interoperability

By: Michelle Duquette, AG Operations Ambassador

In a recent fireside chat at the Honeywell American Aviation Leadership Summit, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy laid out an ambitious timeline: rebuild America’s air traffic control (ATC) system by the end of 2028. He said the Brand New Air Traffic Control System (BNATCS) comes with $12.5 billion in initial funding and a promise to move at the “speed of Trump,” rather than the FAA’s traditional 10-15 year project cycles. So far, this seems like exactly what we’ve all been waiting years to hear.

Duffy described his vision for BNATCS using a smartphone analogy. “I want to build a phone so when those new apps with new technology come out, we’re able to deploy it into the field,” he said, emphasizing the desire to build a platform which can grow and evolve rather than becoming obsolete by the time it’s deployed. It’s the right vision. 

But is he going far enough?

If the integrator requirements and Phase 1 architecture decisions underway right now don’t explicitly include UAS and Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) low-altitude solutions that support national airspace system (NAS) interoperability, perhaps we’re not building that smartphone. We’re building a flip phone with the promise of adding apps later. We learned the hard way with NextGen that this type of approach falls short. And eventually “later” becomes “never.”

That’s not a dig at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), by any means. They’ve done a miraculous job during my two-decade tenure serving the government in sustaining the world’s safest airspace system despite annual budget reductions and aging infrastructure. They often had to choose between sustainment and modernization. In my opinion, they made the right choice every time. And so here we are.

Secretary Duffy expressed excitement about emerging aviation. “We have supersonic new technology, eVTOLs, this explosion of innovation. It’s our job to make sure we get it right,” he told the crowd.

Completion of BNATCS Phase 1 is targeted for 2028.

What he didn’t say, but what those of us working in state-level implementation of drones and AAM know, is that AAM operations will be happening during the BNATCS build window. They aren’t waiting until 2030 or 2035 to arrive.  

The FAA’s eVTOL Integration Pilot Program (eIPP) stand-up is in progress, for example. States like Texas, Arizona, Utah, Michigan and Indiana are planning AAM corridors, developing operational frameworks, allocating funding for (and in some cases already executing) infrastructure updates, and positioning for Phase 1 eIPP awards that could launch as early as 2026-2027. Public Safety drone operations expand daily. Beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) cargo and medical delivery operations are positioned to scale.

The math has me worried.

Secretary Duffy was blunt about the competitive landscape. He warned, “If we think of someone else in another part of the world developing this technology and deployment here, it’s not just bad for American jobs, American innovators, it’s bad for national security, national defense.”

He’s absolutely right. 

We need the same logic to literally apply to airspace management systems. China and other nations are building integrated air traffic systems that natively handle traditional aircraft, drones, and AAM traffic. They’re not bolting UAS traffic management (UTM) onto legacy ATC infrastructure by depending upon industry (which could potentially mean software of unknown pedigree.) They’re architecting for heterogeneous operations from the ground up.

If BNATCS is designed in a silo, with fiber replacing copper and digital replacing analog, but is fundamentally still built around the operational paradigm of manned aircraft separation, we’re creating a strategic vulnerability. American AAM companies like Joby, Wisk, Archer, and Beta will face regulatory bottlenecks that foreign competitors won’t experience in markets with unified airspace architectures.

This cannot be about giving the FAA another “system to integrate” in five years. It must be all about baking the right requirements into the integrator selection and Phase 1 architecture today:

• Unified data architecture that natively ingests UAS Remote ID, AAM flight plans enabled by performance-based policy and procedures, and UTM data that feeds alongside traditional instrument flight rules (IFR) traffic.
• Open standards and APIs that allow state-level UTM networks, public safety Team Awareness Kit (TAK) servers, and low-altitude UAS service suppliers (USS) and AAM Provider of Services for Urban Air Mobility (PSU) to exchange data with ATC systems.
• AI/ML-enabled safety tools that detect and analyze conflict trends in complement with current situational awareness capabilities (e.g., radars) and deconfliction tools (e.g., Conflict Probe) across all aircraft types, not just Part 91/121/135 operations.
• Integrator competency demonstrated through actual UTM, AAM corridor, or heterogeneous NAS experience.

The eIPP program offers a ready-made opportunity to validate BNATCS interoperability assumptions. States and regions selected for the eIPP will be effectively beta-testing the operational framework that BNATCS must support at scale.

Rather than treating eIPP as a separate “AAM track,” the integrator and FAA should engage with eIPP teams as operational evaluation laboratories. What data do AAM operators and ATC need to exchange? How do drone detect-and-avoid (DAA) systems augment ATC separation services? Is electronic conspicuity a solution for both drone and visual flight rules (VFR) situational awareness? What does collaborative decision-making look like when eVTOLs share terminal airspace with drones, helicopters, business jets, and commercial airline traffic?

These aren’t theoretical questions. They’re being answered in real time. Unfortunately, this is often happening with proprietary, non-interoperable solutions that create the very fragmentation that Secretary Duffy’s smartphone analogy warns against.

Secretary Duffy has been consistent in his message across venues. At the recent Honeywell Summit, he invited industry input during his fireside chat with Honeywell Aerospace CEO, Jim Currier. At EAA AirVenture earlier this year, he was equally direct: “The best ideas do not come from DOT. The best ideas don’t come from the FAA. The best ideas come from all of you… And if you have great ideas on what we can do differently, what we can do better, that’s going to drive innovation and drive safety. We are all ears.” 

This commitment to collaboration, while encouraging, must extend beyond basic aviation reform into the architecture of BNATCS itself. As Rex Alexander, AG Ambassador for Infrastructure and CEO of Five Alpha LLC noted in his recent Autonomy Global OpEd, achieving the administration’s goals for UAS and AAM leadership requires more than just policy statements. It demands that government agencies “actively partner and engage with industry where they are.”

So here’s an idea: Make integrated UAS/AAM/traditional aircraft operations a success metric for the BNATCS integrator selection. 

Not a Phase 2 add-on. Not a future consideration. Rather, a day-one requirement.

The $12.5 billion Phase 1 investment should be evaluated not just for replacing infrastructure, but also for enabling the airspace operations of the 2030s. This means the integrator selection process must include demonstrated competency in heterogeneous airspace management, and the technical requirements must specify data exchange standards that support UTM, e-conspicuity, and AAM service providers from the start.

The pieces are all there: the funding, the urgency, the recognition that technology is moving faster than traditional timelines, an FAA Administrator who understands the nuances of the NAS, and a Secretary who has publicly committed to industry collaboration. What’s missing is the deliberate decision to treat airspace interoperability as a foundational requirement, rather than a future problem.

If we spend billions building a system that’s obsolete on arrival, we’ve just repeated the exact pattern Secretary Duffy was hired to break. The eIPP corridors launching in the next year or two will become incompatible with the BNATCS architecture deployed in 2028-2030. States will deploy proprietary solutions. Industry will fragment. And American leadership in AAM will stall while other nations forge ahead with integrated systems.

I thought we were no longer in the “this is how we’ve always done it” or the traditional deployment waterfall world. So break some glass. Be deliberate, use plain language and be bold. We have one chance to get the future architecture right. And that time is now. So let’s not waste it.