WASHINGTON (TNND) — When boarding a plane, passengers can usually take for granted that safety systems on the ground will operate as they should, but a series of Air Traffic Control outages at major airports have shaken Americans’ confidence in the integrity of air travel safety.

“We’re using equipment that looks like it’s off the Apollo 13 set,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said earlier this month when he unveiled a plan to build an entirely new Air Traffic Control system, one he said is so “antiquated” that sometimes replacement parts can’t even be found on eBay.

“What you see in Newark, we’re gonna have to fix, we’re gonna have to move fast, but we’re gonna do it right. My concern is that we could see other situations like this around the country because the system is old,” Duffy said, referring to the series of outages at Newark Liberty International Airport this month.

The proposed project included replacing telecommunications equipment, like 475 voice switches and 25,000 radios. The department also aims to replace machines and rebuild facilities past their prime, such as 618 radars and six Air Traffic Control centers from the 1960s.

Dr. Hassan Shahidi, President and CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation, said the Department of Transportation’s plans to replace the entire system’s copper wires with fiber were also critical.

“Fiber is certainly much more modern and in terms of latency and time delays to communicate between facilities, it’s absolutely the way to go,” Shahidi said.

However, Shahidi said he’s concerned about the FAA, which still doesn’t have a Senate-confirmed administrator, being able to manage a complete transformation of this infrastructure after the Trump administration’s efforts drastically reduced the federal workforce.

“As we know, many of the federal employees in the FAA have taken the (DOGE) buyout, the early retirement and so the FAA has a vacuum in terms of expertise and management knowledge that’s necessary to be able to really undertake a project of this size,” Shahidi said.

It’s a project that did not come with a price tag. Duffy said it’s up to Congress to determine how much it will cost. In what would be a first, he also asked lawmakers to provide him with all the money up front in order to accomplish the transformation in just a few years, rather than the decade-plus an undertaking of this magnitude would ordinarily require.