FAA’s Report on Air Traffic Modernization Presents an Incomplete and Out-of-Date Assessment of NextGen

What We Looked At Section 502 of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Reauthorization Act of 2018 mandated that FAA report on the Agency’s progress in implementing Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) programs and that Department of Transportation (DOT) Office of Inspector General (OIG) review the accuracy of FAA’s report. NextGen is an infrastructure effort aimed at modernizing our Nation’s aging air traffic system to provide safer and more efficient air traffic management. As a complex multibillion-dollar, multi-year undertaking, NextGen encompasses multiple programs, procedures, and systems at differing levels of maturity intended to benefit airspace users. Our objectives were to (1) assess FAA’s report on its implementation of NextGen and (2) report the status of OIG’s NextGen recommendations.   What We Found FAA’s Section 502 NextGen report states that all major NextGen systems will be in place by 2025; however, FAA plans to deploy each major system to at least one location by 2025, with full deployment going beyond 2025. The report states that NextGen’s vision has remained constant over time, but our analysis and other stakeholder reports have found that NextGen will be less transformational than originally promised. The report does not include all NextGen expenditures, nor the challenges posed by increasing sustainment and operating costs. The report also projects $100 billion in benefits by 2030, even though FAA had previously acknowledged that this amount was not achievable within that timeframe. In addition, FAA reported that the Agency remains committed to working with industry on NextGen programs, but industry representatives stated that transparency and collaboration with the Agency declined starting in 2018. Finally, of the over 200 NextGen recommendations we made between 2005 to 2022, DOT and FAA have successfully closed all but 3 recommendations. Our Recommendations We made three recommendations for FAA to meet FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018 Section 502 requirements as well as improve communication and transparency on the status of NextGen. FAA concurred with all three of our recommendations and provided acceptable planned action and completion dates.