The Transportation Security Administration expects 2023 summer air travel volumes to surpass pre-pandemic levels, and industry experts are warning that many of the problems that led to last year’s meltdown have not been resolved.
As the head of the non-profit trade organization representing the $1.2 trillion U.S. travel industry, Freeman worries that a repeat of last year’s air travel mayhem will hurt overall tourism spending. “More than half of Americans would travel more often, they say, for leisure in the next six months if the experience were not as much of a hassle as it is today,” Freeman says, adding that “it did not need to be this way.
First, the United States has been woefully slow to update its aging aviation infrastructure. The issue was fully exposed in January when an outage of one of the Federal Aviation Administration’s critical systems led to aSince then, the FAA has been ramping up its ambitious, multi-year, multi-billion-dollar effort, known as NextGen, to modernize the system. Of the agency’s 2023“Aviation infrastructure and technology have been chronically underfunded for years,” says Freeman.
Few people understand the challenges of air traffic control better than Paul Rinaldi, a former 16-year air traffic controller at Washington Dulles International Airport and 12-year president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association . , says Rinaldi. “They closed the air traffic control academy,” he explains “They looked at reducing hours and many air traffic facilities. They looked at closing and cutting more than 100 federal contract towers, and stopped most modernization projects.”
“Every time there’s a threat of a government shutdown, the agency spends weeks preparing for it. And then Congress, at the eleventh hour, kicks the can,” Rinaldi says. “We keep going through the same exercise, and nobody's really working on modernizing the system or getting a system that works. We’re just waiting on Congress, to see if they’re going to fund the system.”In a summer filled with massive flight disruptions, it will be everyday airline passengers who bear the pain.