In the wake of Friday's air traffic control meltdown, I've been thinking about ATC modernization. I'm convinced we can rip and replace the whole system for less money than we spend maintaining the current broken one—while meaningfully improving safety. Taxpayers could get a dividend, not a new bill. But it would require doing politically uncomfortable things, like building the whole system on Starlink, eliminating almost all air traffic control jobs, and changing the day-to-day experience of pilots. The current system is so insane - literally we have pilots talking to controllers on two-way radios. If two people press the "talk" button at the same time, they can't hear each other. And it only gets worse from there. So here's an early-draft sketch of something better. * Every airplane has dual-redundant Starlink antennae. * Establish that the reliability of dual-link Satcomm beats the current system (I think it will, handily). * Starlink implements better-than-GPS global positioning * Every aircraft uploads position and trajectory data in realtime * This simple system replaces every tens of thousands of radio and radar sites, each of which is fragile and expensive to maintain. We don't need old copper lines. Or new fiber ones. * It also replaces all of the ground-based navigation and approach systems. ILS, RNAV, VORs and even airport ground surveillance — literally all of the legacy navigation claptrap can be ditched * To fly in the national airspace, every airplane must have Starlink (or equivalent, if/when someone makes an equivalent) * Perhaps, airborne weather data and radar returns are also uploaded in realtime. With critical mass, we can have a 3D synthetic view of realtime weather without needing today's weather ground stations. Improved weather predictive models can be built and deployed. This will be great for cost and for safety. * Cloud ATC and pilots communicate over satcom-based text and/or structured digital communication. This functionality should be built into cockpits, but that won't happen quickly with Boeing/Airbus slowness so pilots can use iPhones/iPads/EFBs and effectively just text with ATC instead of talking on radios like they do today. * Similarly any ground vehicle on an airport (fire trucks, fuel trucks etc) must have a satcom connection with realtime position reporting, with the ability to make requests digitally and respond to commands. This allows the system to manage runway incursions and ground collisions that are a real problem today. * Non-emergency ATC is completely automated, no need for humans for routine traffic control. * Right now, we have maybe a few thousand airplanes in the air across the country at any given time. But the skies are huge and can support far more traffic with far more efficient automated routing. * The hard part is unexpected situations, emergency management. There is 24/7 human staffing for this, which would require maybe ~1% of the ATC staff we have today. * This will save *so much money* we can give controllers five years of severance and pay for them to go back to school to learn another trade. * SpaceX should be willing to develop and operate the whole system for free, because it will result in selling more Starlink service. Start with en-route traffic and run the new system for a little while in parallel with the old and monitor for where human interventions are required. I think the new system will quickly prove it's better than the old, then can be turned off. This is far from fully worked out, but I'm convinced a much, much better system is possible. It would need hardcore leadership and significant bipartisan political will. Maybe that's laughably impossible, but I don't want to be so pessimistic.