Verizon Communications has received a potential contract worth $2.4 billion from the Federal Aviation Administration to upgrade the agency’s technology systems.
Verizon will construct a network with administrative services and secure communications, according to the FAA. According to a spokeswoman for the agency, the contract would reach its full potential value after 15 years if the FAA exercised all of its options under the agreement.
According to Verizon, the company will construct a network “to support all of the agency’s mission-critical applications,” which include air traffic management for over 45,000 daily flights.
The agreement, revealed Thursday, comes almost three months after a basic ready framework fizzled, briefly stopping withdrawing trips the nation over. Contractors who accidentally deleted files from a database and its backup, the FAA claimed, were to blame for the outage.
The alert system and numerous other programs need to be modernized, according to FAA officials. Officials from airlines have offered their support to the agency and urged Congress to increase funding for FAA technology.