US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has unveiled legislation intended to complete the modernization of the country's air traffic control system, announcing the bill in a live-streamed event covered by Fox Business.

The legislation marks the formal step Duffy has signaled since taking over the Department of Transportation: converting the long-running, piecemeal upgrade of US air traffic infrastructure into a legally mandated program with a defined completion path.

At stake is the equipment backbone of the world's busiest national airspace. Controllers across US terminal and en-route facilities still work with aging radar, radio and data-processing systems, some of which date back decades. The outages and equipment failures that have repeatedly disrupted operations at facilities handling the largest volumes of traffic have kept the modernization question on the regulatory agenda.

Duffy framed the bill as the instrument to finish the job. The legislation follows his public statements that the Federal Aviation Administration needs new infrastructure — replacement radar, communications and automation — rather than continued patching of legacy systems.

The announcement puts congressional action at the center of the effort. Legislation, rather than regulator-only procurement, would give the program statutory footing and, supporters of the approach argue, a funding and schedule discipline that past upgrade cycles have lacked.

For airlines, the consequences are direct. Air traffic control equipment failures translate into ground stops, capacity restrictions and network-level delays that carriers cannot schedule around. A completed modernization program would affect dispatch reliability across the system, particularly at congested Northeast corridor airports and high-volume hubs where aging infrastructure has constrained throughput.

The FAA's modernization effort, long run under the NextGen banner, has delivered capability in increments — satellite-based navigation routes, data communications and improved surveillance among them — but full replacement of the core controller-facing infrastructure has remained incomplete. Duffy's legislation targets exactly that unfinished portion.

The secretary announced the bill in a public, live-broadcast setting, an indication the Trump administration intends to make the completion of air traffic control modernization a visible policy priority rather than a quiet procurement exercise inside the FAA.

Watchers of the program will now look to Capitol Hill. The bill's text, its authorization figures and its schedule milestones will determine whether the legislation imposes real deadlines on the FAA or restates existing agency plans in statutory language. Duffy's next test is moving the measure through Congress before the current momentum around air traffic control funding subsides.