DC plane crash: Blame the feds needlessly, woefully outdated air-traffic control

We still don’t know what mistakes led to the disaster at Reagan National Airport that killed 67 last week.But one thing has been clear for decades: America’s air-traffic control system, once the world’s most advanced, is an international disgrace.Long before the Obama and Biden administrations’ quest to diversify staff in control towers, the system was already one of the worst in the developed world.The recent rash of near-collisions is the result of chronic mismanagement that has left the system with too few controllers using absurdly antiquated technology.The problems were obvious 20 years ago, when I visited control towers in both Canada and the United States.The Canadians sat in front of sleek computer screens that instantly handled tasks like transferring the oversight of a plane from one controller to another.The Americans were still using pieces of paper called flight strips.After a plane took off, the controller in charge of the local airspace had to carry that plane’s flight strip over to the desk of the controller overseeing the regional airspace.It felt like going back in time from a modern newsroom into a scene from “The Front Page.”It was bad enough to see such outdated technology in 2005.

But they’re still using those paper flight strips in American towers, and the Federal Aviation Administration’s modernization plans have been delayed so many times that the strips aren’t due to be phased out until 2032.The rest of the system is similarly archaic.The United States is way behind Europe in using satellites to guide and monitor planes, forcing pilots and controllers to rely on much less precise readings from radio beacons and ground-based radar.Overseas controllers use high-resolution cameras and infrared sensors to monitor planes on runways, but many American controllers still have to look out the window — which is why a FedEx cargo plane almost landed on top of a passenger jet two years ago in Austin, Tex.It was a foggy morning, ...