On 4 January 2026, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced that RTX and Indra Sistemas would replace 612 aging surveillance radars by June 2028. In a December 2025 Global Airspace Radar interview conducted in Hong Kong, Indra stated that a year ago they would not have been in a position to deliver that quickly, but now they can.
While the company can deliver equipment on time, delivery is not the only potential stumbling block for the modernisation project.
Indra has invested $50m in a US manufacturing facility. RTX’s Condor Mk3 and ASR-XM radars already hold FAA qualification. Both firms bring extensive deployment experience across multiple continents. From an equipment-supply standpoint, the vendors are better positioned than at any point in recent memory.
But building radar equipment is not the same as replacing 612 radar sites in 30 months while the National Airspace System remains fully operational. The announced timeline requires completing roughly one site every 1.5 working days, a rate no FAA modernisation programme has ever achieved.
Pre-certification removes approximately 10-15% of the total schedule: the equipment design approval phase that historically consumed 12-18 months. The remaining 85% stays fixed.
Flight inspection sets the ceiling
Under FAA Order 8200.1D, every new radar must undergo commissioning flight inspection at its specific location. Inspection aircraft verify azimuth alignment, vertical and horizontal coverage patterns, terrain masking and surveillance accuracy along every airway the system will serve. Each radar’s fix-and-map accuracy must be verified to within 500ft (150m), a tolerance that cannot be determined from the factory floor.
The FAA’s Flight Inspection Services operates roughly 40 aircraft nationwide, handling not only radar commissioning but instrument procedures, navigation aids and emergency responses. Even dedicating half that fleet substantially to radar work yields realistic throughput of 20-30 sites per month in favourable conditions. In Alaska, winter weather limits flight operations to narrow windows. In the Pacific, typhoon season can suspend work for weeks.
At that pace, flight inspection alone consumes 25 months of the 30-month timeline. That is before accounting for the mandatory 60-day operational burn-in during which each new radar operates but cannot be used for aircraft separation.
The technician pipeline cannot be compressed
Pre-certified equipment still requires certified technicians. The FAA’s Airway Transportation Systems Specialists – approximately 4,800 technicians maintaining more than 74,000 pieces of NAS equipment – must complete formal theory training, structured on-the-job training and performance examinations for each new radar type. The certification window spans 180 days minimum per technician per system.
Curriculum development through the FAA’s Instructional Systems Development process historically takes 12-24 months for complex safety-critical systems. If development started only after the January 2026 contract awards, training pipelines may not reach full capacity until late 2028, after the political deadline has passed.
Each site needs three to five certified technicians to cover shifts and maintenance requirements. Across 612 sites, that translates to 1,800 to 3,000 new certifications, all while the same personnel continue maintaining legacy equipment throughout the transition.
Parallel operations compound the cost
Old and new radars must run simultaneously at each site during transition. The legacy system remains the certified separation source until the replacement passes flight inspection and completes its burn-in period. This dual-running state increases power consumption, technician workload and integration complexity, typically raising site costs to 150-180% of normal operations.
With 80-120 sites in parallel operation at any given time under a rolling deployment, the programme carries an additional $200-300m annually in operating costs that no agency announcement has acknowledged.
Realistic versus idealistic timelines
Under maximum aggressive assumptions (fast-tracked curricula, 24 sites per month through inspection, minimal technical surprises), the first sites would become fully operational around month 21. The last sites would complete around month 48. That represents a timeline 55% longer than announced, assuming early perfect execution across every subsystem.
Historical precedent suggests longer still. NextGen has consumed more than $36bn across two decades without delivering its original benefit targets. The ASR-11 programme was re-baselined in 2005 from 112 systems to 66 after years of schedule problems. Based on these precedents, a realistic timeline extends to six to 11 years, with completion between 2032 and 2037.
The radar network genuinely needs replacement, and the vendors selected can deliver quality equipment. The question is whether stakeholders will demand realistic timelines, or settle for confidence in headlines and crisis in the airspace.
