FAA's ASR-9 and ASR-11 Airport Radars Face End-of-Life Without Successors

The FAA's terminal area surveillance relies on approximately 270 Airport Surveillance Radars (ASR-9 and ASR-11) installed at airports across the United States. The ASR-9, deployed between 1989 and 1996, is the workhorse of the system, providing primary radar coverage for aircraft within 60 nautical miles of major airports. These systems are now 28-36 years old, well past their original 20-year design life. Replacement parts are increasingly unavailable because original manufacturers have discontinued component production, forcing the FAA to maintain a 'cannibalization' inventory — stripping parts from decommissioned units to keep operational ones running. The consequence of a terminal radar failure is immediate and costly. When an ASR goes down at a busy airport, air traffic control must increase aircraft spacing from 3-5 nautical miles to 5-10+ nautical miles because controllers lose the ability to precisely track positions. This effectively cuts airport capacity by 30-50%, creating cascading delays across the national airspace system. A single radar outage at a hub airport like Atlanta or Chicago O'Hare can delay hundreds of flights within hours. The FAA's own data shows that radar system outages contributed to over 4,500 hours of reduced airport capacity in 2022. The modernization bottleneck is fundamentally about the FAA's procurement and certification culture. The FAA's NextGen modernization program, launched in 2004, was supposed to transition terminal surveillance from rotating radar to ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast) and multilateration. ADS-B Out became mandatory in January 2020, but the FAA has not been able to decommission a single ASR because ADS-B depends on aircraft transponders — it cannot detect non-cooperative targets (aircraft with failed or disabled transponders, drones, general aviation without ADS-B). The FAA is therefore stuck maintaining two parallel surveillance systems indefinitely, with neither fully funded. Congress authorized $2.3 billion for ATC facilities in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (2021), but this covers buildings, not radar replacement.