WASHINGTON (7News) — U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy says on Thursday in Washington, D.C., he will announce a plan to modernize the air traffic control systems used by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

“We're going to need a lot of money from Congress to do this,” Duffy said in an interview with CNN on Tuesday. “You can't snap your fingers and lay fiber or bring in new radios or new radar. Those things take time, and we're going to put the time and the money in, and you're going to start to see results.”

WTOP reporter and aviation expert Dan Ronan told 7News that modernizing the FAA's air traffic control equipment is something both Republican and Democratic administrations have wanted to do for a long time, but it has proved difficult.

“There’s a lot of new equipment in the towers and in the approach and the other facilities, but we’re still a long way away from having a modernized 21st-century air traffic control system,” Ronan said. “A lot of it, sad to say, is running on computer technology from the 1980s and 1990s in some cases.”

Duffy’s planned announcement Thursday comes after last week, Duffy announced a plan to address a shortage of about 3000 air traffic controllers. The plan contained initiatives to retain veteran controllers and to give financial incentives to new controllers.

Duffy’s efforts come in the wake of a deadly midair collision over the Potomac River in January that killed 67 people.

Since that collision, there have been numerous other concerning incidents, one of the most recent being last week when an Army Black Hawk helicopter flying near the Pentagon led air traffic controllers to order two commercial planes to go around instead of landing as planned.