Across the U.S., a web of ancient copper wires connect airport control towers to radars and weather observation stations, helping air traffic controllers communicate and get the data they need to make sure planes get where they’re supposed to go safely.
But this decades-old system is starting to fail. Airports have been forced to ground planes due to telecommunications failures. Now, after a series of near misses and a shocking midair collision in Washington, D.C. that killed 67 people, the pressure is on the Trump administration to address rising public fear over air safety.
Help is on the way, newly minted Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy reassured the public a week after the disaster. Elon Musk and SpaceX were stepping in.
The billionaire’s company reportedly may be tapped for a crash upgrade of the FAA’s telecom system, never mind that it didn’t play a role in the Washington disaster. And never mind that Verizon already has a $2.4 billion, 15-year contract to replace all that copper wire with lightning-fast fiber-optic cables. A SpaceX engineer tasked to the FAA told agency staffers that Musk himself had directed that they deploy thousands of the company’s Starlink satellite internet terminals, according to Bloomberg.
That creates obvious and serious conflicts of interests, with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency currently burrowing into the agency that acts as SpaceX’s primary regulator. But worse, it makes no sense. Starlink may be suitable to connect remote FAA facilities, but it doesn’t currently have the bandwidth or reliability to serve as the backbone of the agency’s nationwide communications network. Plus, SpaceX has no apparent experience in serving as a prime contractor for a solution incorporating a mix of communications technologies.
“As a backup layer or alternative connectivity provider, Starlink makes sense,” Kim Burke, a government affairs analyst at the consultancy Quilty Space, told Forbes. “But SpaceX spearheading a total overhaul of the FAA’s terrestrial networks? Not a chance.”
High among the concerns: FAA will have to do substantial testing on the time it takes for Starlink signals to travel, known as latency, said Hassan Shahidi, CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation. “You don’t want to have a disruption or slowness in your network with safety critical systems. We’re talking about real-time information that air traffic control needs.”
FAA and SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment. After publication of this article, SpaceX wrote on Musk’s social media platform X that the company wasn’t seeking to take over Verizon’s contract, but that it was working with FAA and L3Harris to see “where Starlink could serve as a long-term infrastructure upgrade for aviation safety.”
Verizon declined to comment on whether its contract is in peril. Spokesman Richard Young said by email, “Protecting Americans who rely on a safe, secure and functioning air traffic control system is more important than ever, and our enhancements will help make that happen.”
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The FAA has been struggling for decades to upgrade its air traffic control and communications systems, let alone take care of what it’s currently relying on. The agency doesn’t have adequate resources to maintain 37% of its 138 air traffic control systems, a GAO report found last year. Verizon’s contract, which also involves data management and security, and maintenance of a new telecom network, is one of the building blocks of a multi-decade, multibillion-dollar FAA program called NextGen that aims to transition air traffic management from ground-based technologies like radar to a system based on satellite navigation and digital communications.
But plans to build the telecom network are not yet finalized. FAA leadership had been concerned that Verizon wasn’t moving quickly enough, said Katie Thomson, who stepped down as deputy administrator of the agency in January.
While the FAA had been planning to push Verizon leadership on whether the project was “appropriately scoped and resourced,” the concerns didn’t merit radical action like replacing Verizon entirely, Thomson said. Handing the contract to SpaceX without opening it back up for competitive bidding would violate FAA rules and give Verizon strong grounds to sue–and delay the project. “This turmoil creates serious risks in the timing for delivering the solution,” she said. Senior FAA officials have been resisting requests to approve a handover of the telecom contract from Verizon to SpaceX, the Washington Post reported.
There are no public indications that SpaceX bid for the original contract, which had been in the works since 2018 and was awarded in 2023. FAA had no shortage of competitors to choose from: Verizon beat out L3Harris, manager of the FAA’s current communications system, as well as Raytheon, General Dynamics and Leidos.
Musk hasn’t openly agitated to take over the project, but he claimed last week on X that Starlink was at least a stopgap solution “to restore air traffic control connectivity,” writing that he was sending terminals to the FAA at no cost. Musk falsely accused Verizon’s system—which doesn’t yet exist—of being on the verge of collapse, a mistake he later fessed up to.
Starlink could be a viable alternative for communications at remote FAA sites, which would be expensive to connect via fiber. The FAA said last month it’s evaluating using Starlink satellites to deliver weather information in places like Alaska, where communications outages of weather observation stations have caused problems for years. But SpaceX would struggle to meet all the performance requirements that FAA laid out when it invited bids, because beaming communications to and from moving spacecraft is simply not as reliable as using fiber optic cables in the ground.
FAA stipulated in bidding documents that critical services like radar data, and voice communications between controllers and pilots, should have latency of no more than 50 milliseconds. Starlink’s latency can exceed that, ranging from 25 to 60 milliseconds, according to SpaceX’s website. And the variation in its latency is high, according to research last year by Geoff Huston, chief scientist at the Asia Pacific Network Information Center. With Starlink’s constellation constantly circling overhead, latency spikes by 30 to 50 milliseconds every time the connection to the customer on the ground hops from satellite to satellite — which occurs every 15 seconds, he found.
To reduce its latency problems, SpaceX has applied to the Federal Communications Commission to operate satellites at lower altitudes, as well as to use a broader range of the radiofrequency spectrum. But competitors have urged FCC to deny the requests on the ground that it would interfere with their satellites’ transmissions.
SpaceX has also never claimed that Starlink could serve many customers in dense urban regions, as its satellites can only support so much bandwidth within each geographical area. That raises questions as to whether it’s suitable for ATC facilities with hundreds of staff near major airports. Due to bandwidth constraints, Starlink isn’t accepting new residential customers in a number of areas across the U.S., including the Seattle-Portland region, Phoenix and large swathes of Florida.
Then there are disruptions that can occur with satellite communications, like geomagnetic disturbances from solar storms.
The Flight Safety Foundation urged the FAA to “conduct a thorough, comprehensive safety assessment of considering a satellite communication solution,” said Shahidi. “And that will take some time.”
But changes at the FAA could be coming fast. “We’re going to look at a year, year-and-a-half time frame and do massive upgrades, improve the systems, help air traffic controllers, keep our skies safer,” Duffy said on Fox News last week.
Where Musk and his acolytes see speed and efficiency, Democratic lawmakers see corruption. In a letter to Duffy, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) wrote, “The apparent selection of Musk-owned Starlink as an FAA contractor reeks of the most corrupt, self-serving abuses that federal procurement laws and principles are intended to prevent.”
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