Getting Air Traffic Control Right

Any frequently delayed flier can tell you that this nation’s air traffic control system is antiquated. Many controllers still use technology from the era of the Pan Am Clipper--strips of paper and slide rules--to line planes up on narrow tracks in the sky rather than the global positioning satellites and computer systems that allow controllers to guide planes along more flexible and efficient flight paths.

The system remains outmoded because the Federal Aviation Administration’s plan to replace it with a Loral Corp. complex was largely mothballed in 1994 after being deemed unworkable.

The FAA’s key challenge in finding a new replacement is to avoid another debacle, and that’s why its proposal last week to sidestep the usual federal policy of seeking competitive bids and to simply give Lockheed Martin Corp. the lead role in designing the new system is so troubling.

Lockheed is intimately tied to Loral, having entered the air traffic control business just after acquiring most of that company. Bush administration officials, in turn, are uncomfortably close to Lockheed: Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta was one of its vice presidents, and the man expected to be his deputy, Michael P. Jackson, was an executive of a Lockheed subsidiary.

The FAA says it settled on Lockheed long before Mineta was tapped for Bush’s Cabinet, and Mineta has removed himself from participating in the agency’s final decision on a contractor. Moreover, no one could argue that Lockheed is unprepared for the job: Since 1999 it has been working with Airways New Zealand, that country’s FAA equivalent, which uses cutting-edge technologies to track and display flights.

Nevertheless, to avoid both real and apparent conflicts of interest and ensure that all creative solutions are on the table, the FAA should reconsider its proposal to just hand over modernization responsibility to Lockheed. It should take competitive bids.

This month Congress will begin debating a bill to junk the bad economics in the current system. The bill would, among other things, encourage airlines to use bigger craft to more efficiently deal with heavy passenger traffic. In the meantime the task of implementing new technologies to improve air traffic is the FAA’s most important task. Congress and President Bush should ensure that the agency does not repeat the mistakes of its past.