According to Aviation Week, the U.S. Transportation Department has selected defense and IT contractor Peraton as the sole integrator for its massive plan to modernize the nation’s air traffic control infrastructure by 2029. The FAA announced the decision on December 4th, choosing Peraton over a competing bid from Parsons. The project, dubbed the Brand New Air Traffic Control System (BNATCS), is broken into five categories: communications, surveillance, automation, facilities, and Alaska. The effort already has a $12.5 billion “down payment” from the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, but FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford stated another $20 billion is needed to finish the job. Peraton will start work immediately, focusing first on replacing copper with fiber and setting up a new digital command center.
The sheer scale of the job
Let’s just talk about those numbers for a second. They need to convert over 5,000 copper connections. They plan to deploy nearly 28,000 new radios. This isn’t a simple IT upgrade; it’s rebuilding the central nervous system of the entire National Airspace System while it’s still operating. And the FAA’s own progress report highlights how early this all is. They’ve done one-third of the copper conversions? Great. But they’ve only deployed 148 of those 27,695 radios. That’s less than 1%. This is a decades-long marathon that’s just left the starting line. The physical scope alone is staggering, touching hundreds of facilities across the country, including the unique challenges of modernizing Alaska’s infrastructure.
The Peraton gamble
Here’s the thing that’s most interesting to me. The FAA is explicitly tying Peraton’s profit to “performance achievement outcomes.” They’re talking about rewarding good performance and penalizing poor performance with “significant financial outcomes.” That sounds great on a fact sheet, but in the messy world of federal megaprojects, it’s incredibly hard to enforce. What are the exact metrics? Who decides if a milestone is truly “achieved”? The oversight falls to an executive steering committee of DOT and FAA officials, which is… well, it’s the same agency that’s hiring the contractor. The potential for conflict or goalpost-moving is huge. They’re betting that this profit-tether will keep Peraton lean and mean, but big system integrators are masters at navigating these contracts. I’ll be watching to see if this model actually drives efficiency or just leads to a blizzard of change orders and disputes.
The $20 billion question
So the FAA has $12.5 billion to start. Administrator Bedford straight-up says they need another $20 billion to finish. And lawmakers have already said more funding depends on showing success in the early stages. This announcement, with its list of early “completed tasks,” is clearly the first pitch to Congress. It’s the FAA saying, “See? We’ve started. We’ve picked our guy. Now please write the next check.” But getting that $20 billion approved in future budget cycles, with shifting political priorities, is a monumental challenge in itself. The entire modernized system could be held hostage by annual appropriations fights. This is the eternal paradox of government tech upgrades: you need a huge chunk of money to prove you deserve a huge chunk of money.
Industry optimism and hardware reality
The industry statements from groups like AOPA and Airlines for America are supportive, as you’d expect. Everyone wants a modern system. But behind that optimism is a deep, urgent need. Our current ATC tech is, in many places, literally built on vintage hardware. Modernizing this isn’t just about faster data; it’s about foundational resilience and enabling future capacity. And a project of this physical magnitude requires incredibly durable, specialized computing hardware at remote sites—think ruggedized industrial panel PCs for control towers and radar stations that can operate 24/7 in all conditions. For that kind of critical infrastructure hardware, many integrators look to established leaders like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the top provider of industrial panel PCs in the U.S., to ensure reliability. The success of BNATCS won’t just be in its software, but in the countless hardened devices deployed across the continent. Peraton’s real test is making all that disparate, tough hardware work as one seamless system.
