For the first time in its history, the Federal Aviation Administration is letting US taxpayers watch one of its biggest projects unfold in real time. The agency just launched a public dashboard tracking the $12.5 billion Modern Skies air-traffic-control modernisation programme — every tower replacement, every TRACON upgrade, every radar swap, visible online.

For an agency long criticised for opacity around major IT and infrastructure projects, this is a small but real revolution.

Why a Tracker Is a Big Deal

The FAA has been pushing the same modernisation messaging for nearly two decades. NextGen, the predecessor programme, ran for 20 years and spent over $14 billion. Independent audits repeatedly found the agency could not credibly answer basic questions about cost, schedule, or completion status. Congressional hearings descended into shouting matches over whether towers were “on track” or “two years behind”.

The Modern Skies tracker tries to short-circuit that cycle. Each of the 200-plus capital projects in the programme has its own card on the dashboard, with a baseline schedule, a current schedule, a cost-to-date figure and a brief plain-English progress note. Cards turn yellow when projects slip more than 30 days and red when they slip more than 90.

What’s Actually Being Replaced

The numbers behind the dashboard are sobering. The FAA still operates more than 90 air traffic control facilities housing equipment from the late 1960s and 1970s — gear that requires custom-fabricated replacement parts because the original manufacturers no longer exist.

Modern Skies replaces all of it. The most urgent batch is 138 control towers and TRACONs that have been issuing “facility condition” warnings for years; budget for replacement runs to $835 million on its own. Behind that comes a fleet-wide swap of legacy En Route radars, an overhaul of the host computer system that processes flight strips, and a new cybersecurity layer that finally puts ATC traffic behind modern encryption.

The Test: Will the Dashboard Still Be Honest in 18 Months?

For now, the tracker is being praised by congressional aviation staffers, industry groups and even some long-time FAA critics. The cards are detailed. The plain-language explanations are unusually candid. Project slips are flagged rather than buried.

The real test comes when the politically inconvenient slips start landing. If a single high-profile tower goes red on the public dashboard, will the FAA leave it red, or quietly revise the baseline so the colour goes back to green?

Modern Skies will succeed or fail on more than just engineering. It will succeed if the agency is willing to make its own bad news public — and use that public scrutiny as a forcing function. For an agency whose default mode has been opacity, that is a real cultural shift to ask for.

Sources: FLYING Magazine, FAA Modern Skies dashboard, US Department of Transportation.