Inside the control tower at John F. Kennedy International Airport, air traffic controllers can track planes travelling hundreds of miles away.

But when it’s time for a controller to hand off responsibility for watching a flight, the technology becomes decidedly last century: details are printed on a slip of paper and passed to a co-worker.

President Donald Trump promised on Monday to sweep away such outmoded systems and replace them with “the best, newest and safest technology available.”

Trump’s solution is to split air traffic control away from the Federal Aviation Administration and privatise it under a not-for-profit, independent corporation.

Billions of dollars in government and private contracts ride on the conversion of the nation’s air traffic control system to satellite-based GPS.

A federal modernisation programme known as NextGen has already targeted traditional ground-based radar and other aging technologies for replacement.

Private-sector companies angling for a piece of this business see wide commercial potential for products unleashed by the US modernisation effort, including digital cockpit messaging, live monitoring of aircraft engines and systems, advanced weather maps and faster internet service for passengers.

“It’s a big deal for us,” said David Nieuwsma, a senior vice president in charge of such systems at Rockwell Collins Inc. “We know it’s the future.”

Congress gave the FAA $7.4 billion between 2004 and 2016 to develop and install NextGen systems. The aim was to boost the capacity of the US aviation system to handle more planes, cut flight delays and improve safety, according to a Government Accountability Office report published in November.

Airlines support NextGen and are expected to spend $15 billion upgrading their fleets to prepare for the new systems. But industry players have grown frustrated as the FAA missed implementation deadlines.

The agency now estimates NextGen will cost another $14.8 billion to complete, with many major upgrades not due to be functional until 2025, the GAO said.

Proponents say privatisation will speed NextGen by freeing it from FAA bureaucracy. Modelled after Canada’s widely praised 1996 privatisation, which created an entity known as Nav Canada, the US plan has the backing of most U.S. airlines as well as qualified support from the air traffic controllers union. Critics, including Delta Air Lines, the National Business Aviation Association and an organisation of FAA safety inspectors and technicians, say Congress should instead enact a law to stabilise FAA’s NextGen funding, which is controlled by Congress.

“Privatising the largest and most complex aviation system in the world is a risky and unnecessary step at this pivotal point in its modernisation,” said Mike Perrone, head of the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists, a union of 11,000 FAA safety employees, after Trump’s announcement. “This would slow down enhancements and possibly compromise safety to fix a system that’s not broken.”

Central to the modernisation effort are global positioning satellites that can track planes more accurately than radar, enabling controllers to reduce the distance between aircraft during flight. That allows more takeoffs and landings, which is essential to meet rising global demand for air travel.

That’s creating opportunities for a host of US firms.

The increasing sophistication of commercial and private jets means more opportunities for aerospace manufacturers such as Honeywell International.

Headquartered in Morris Plains, New Jersey, Honeywell recently introduced a weather application that uses “crowdsourced” data from other planes in flight to give pilots a real-time map of turbulence and storms.

Systems by Honeywell and others, such as Chicago-based Gogo Inc are using satellites to give planes internet service fast enough for passengers to stream Netflix and similar services. Pilots can use the same pipeline to share data with each other.

“All of this is going to make the controller job more efficient and effective,” Harris chief executive Bill Brown said in an interview.

The FAA says implementation will start in 2020. (Reuters)