President Donald Trump confused aviation experts with comments he made at the National Prayer Breakfast Thursday morning that seemed to mix up a plane’s onboard electronics system with the federal air traffic control system.
Air traffic control (ATC) handles commercial passenger planes, private jets and military aircraft ... [+]
Speaking at the breakfast about the need to modernize the U.S. air traffic control system, President Trump said, “When I land in my plane, privately, I use a system from another country because...I won't tell you what country... because the captain says this system is so bad, it's so obsolete, that we can't have that.”
It’s unclear what the president meant by “a system from another country” as private jets landing at U.S. airports use the federal air traffic control (ATC) system unless the airport is so small that it does not have a tower.
Trump referred to “landing in New York” but all three major New York City airports and the Morristown Municipal Airport, the closest airport to the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., have ATC towers.
“All aircraft work with ATC—the electronics that they use to receive navigation information can vary, but they have to meet the same criteria,” aviation safety expert and retired commercial airline pilot John Cox told Forbes in an email.
Two other aviation safety experts who did not wish to be named told Forbes they had no idea what the president was talking about.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) declined to comment and the White House did not respond to Forbes’ request for clarification.
Since 2007, the FAA has been updating outdated technology with an ambitious, multi-year, multi-billion-dollar effort known as NextGen, which is supposed to be completed in 2030. Over the years, the project has been hampered by many factors, including system integration challenges, funding uncertainties and FAA staffing issues. In February 2024, the Biden administration allocated nearly $1 billion in federal funding for infrastructure projects to modernize 114 U.S. airports across 44 states and three territories. In September of last year, the Government Accountability Office published a report concluding that the FAA “urgently needed to modernize” the aging system.
“It was an ambiguous statement, obviously from a person not familiar with ATC, navigation systems or instrument requirements,” said Cox.
Canada is one of the few countries in the world to have privatized its air traffic control system. In 1996, the Canadian government sold the system to a private nonprofit corporation called Nav Canada for $1.5 billion CAD, the equivalent of US $1.8 billion today.
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