Federal Aviation Administration Administrator Bryan Bedford promised the country this week that air travel is safe, after a series of system failures have left travelers on edge. Outages at Newark Liberty International Airport last year were among those that led Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to issue warnings that airports are relying on decades-old equipment, saying he was “concerned about the whole airspace.” In a CBS interview published Friday, Bedford said that at least “most” equipment failures have been corrected, though he said some infrastructure remains antiquated. The FAA chief sought to assure the public that he has “zero concerns” that the system “isn’t fundamentally safe,” with his words coming as officials gear up for a historic summer of travel, due to the FIFA World Cup matches in the United States and landmark celebrations for the country’s 250th birthday.
“I think we’re set up for a great summer. I feel like we’ve got the people in place,” Bedford said. “The system is every bit as safe today as it was 10 years ago or five years ago. I fly it every week multiple times, put my family on, I have zero concerns, I lose no sleep whatsoever.”
“Go back to last summer. We saw equipment failures in Washington, Newark, Philadelphia, places where the system was just breaking. Most of that has been corrected, not all of it,” he added. “We still have, I think, some real reliability risk in the system because we’re running off of 1970s and ’80s computing power, compact disks. It’s crazy what the system is using today. …There’s a lot of floppy disks still in the system.”
