On Sept. 21, an aging circuit feeding the FAA’s Philadelphia approach control, or TRACON, failed. The system switched to its backup and found the fiber cut. A construction crew in New Jersey had dug it up. Five major Northeast airports went into ground stops: Newark, Teterboro, Philadelphia, LaGuardia and Kennedy.

In an Oct. 1 op-ed, Jackson Shedelbower called that day “another reminder” of why Congress should grant Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s $30 billion request. I spent 23 years in FAA air traffic control as a controller, quality assurance and training specialist, front-line manager and air traffic manager. Nobody wants this system modernized more than the people who have worked it. But his argument reads the lesson backward.

Start with what he gets right. The equipment is old. The circuit that failed was slated for replacement. Controllers and technicians keep this system running with skill and stubbornness, and they deserve better tools. Congress should pay for them. The controllers’ union backs the request, and so do the airlines and the pilots.

Now his own evidence. He reports that roughly two-thirds of the old copper has been replaced with fiber or wireless links. The meltdown happened anyway, and the line the crew cut was fiber. A backhoe does not care whether the cable it cuts is copper or glass.

He also says what the next money buys: “a modern air traffic flow management system and AI-powered software.”Neither is a second route into a control facility.

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said as much that day. The agency is laying fiber, he said, but it is “the same data architecture that we’ve had for 50 years.”He wants money to replace it. But the head of the FAA is telling you the problem is design.

Resilience comes from separate physical routes, backups that are tested under load and systems that degrade gracefully when a piece drops out. Money pays for them. Money does not make them.

We have run this experiment. After the Newark outages in the spring of 2025, the FAA laid new fiber between New York and Philadelphia and said the upgrade put the link on “two separate communications paths” so equipment would keep working “if one path is disrupted.”Sixteen months after those outages, Philadelphia TRACON lost one circuit, found the other cut and took down the Northeast. I cannot tell you those were the same lines. It was the same facility.

We have also run it at scale. NextGen launched in 2003 with the same promises. Last fall the Transportation Department’s inspector general closed the books on it: a program projected at $36 billion between the FAA and the airlines, more than $15 billion of FAA money spent, and about 16 percent of expected benefits delivered. The memo’s causes: no firm requirements, overambitious plans and programs that depended on each other and on airlines buying equipment on schedule.

The current effort shows the pattern. Congress provided $12.5 billion in July 2025. Bedford told Congress last month that phase one is costing $16 billion. The new request would bring the total to $42.5 billion, against the $31.5 billion the department named last year. The Government Accountability Office found the FAA’s phase one figure leaves out government costs, most operations costs and all of phase two.

Only about a third of the new $30 billion is for air traffic control architecture and software. The rest is split between towers, runways and taxiways, and improvements at midsize airports. None of that two-thirds touches what failed.

Then there are the people who rarely appear in these funding appeals. Controllers must be trained on each new system while still working the traffic. Technicians must maintain old and new side by side until the cutover is finished. I ran a facility training program for nine years. Transition is where the risk lives, and new automation adds workload before it removes any.

Phase one is due by December 2028. The GAO found the FAA running 11,389 separate project schedules with no master schedule, generally without adjusting them to reduce the load on controllers. A cutover run that way is not modernization. It is a new hazard.

So fund it, with conditions. Require that no critical facility depend on a single physical route, and prove it by test. Release the money against milestones, with the inspector general and GAO reporting before each tranche. Put controller training and technician staffing in the same bill as the hardware. And demand a full lifecycle cost before the vote, not after. Shedelbower himself writes of “necessary investment and oversight.”He argues for the first. This is the second.

Shedelbower asks whether travelers are sick of delays and tells them, “This is the answer.”Money is an ingredient. The answer is a plan that can survive a backhoe.

Vincent E. Bianco III is principal consultant of Marivin Consulting Services LLC. He served 23 years in FAA air traffic control as a controller, quality assurance and training specialist, front-line manager and air traffic manager.