00:00The President, could I ask Sean to the Department of Transportation, Sean Duffy, former great congressman, very popular,
00:08decided to go out and make a couple of bucks, he made a lot, and he got bored with that, though.
00:14He likes serving people better, the people.
00:18And could I ask you to just discuss a very important subject to me, and that's the modernization of our equipment at airports
00:25so that planes aren't crashing into each other and bad things don't happen.
00:29And it should have been done many years ago.
00:31We were going to do it, and then the election precluded that, unfortunately.
00:34But we're doing it now.
00:36Could you tell them where we are?
00:37Yeah, if I can start with Newark.
00:39You guys all covered what happened in Newark.
00:41We had outages for a couple of 30-second outages a couple months ago.
00:47We have, in two months, Mr. President, its historic speed laid new fiber lines for communication
00:53and tested those in the next month.
00:56So those new lines for the Philly TRACON that controls the Newark airspace, they're up and running, lightning fast speed.
01:04June was the most on-time June ever in the history of Newark for air travel.
01:10So that's going incredibly well.
01:12By the way, we shouldn't have dealt with this because Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg had moved the center from New York to Philadelphia.
01:19They didn't test the lines.
01:21They didn't do the work, which is what brought us all these problems.
01:25But in the big, beautiful bill, we got $12.5 billion.
01:29This is a historic investment in air traffic control.
01:33And so what the money is going to allow us to do is move from copper to fiber all over the country, so new copper lines.
01:40We think we can do that in a year and a half to two years.
01:42We have radar that dates back to the 1950s, some of it from the 60s and 70s.
01:49We get brand-new radar across the country as well.
01:52We have some infrastructure money to build TRACONs and centers, the en route centers that control the traffic across the country.
02:00So this is a massive new start to rebuild air traffic control.
02:04And, again, this has dilapidated.
02:06Americans think that their government takes care of them and makes investments that are necessary to make the country work.
02:13And for 30, 40 years, the investments weren't made.
02:16And so under your leadership and direction, we are making those investments in per-year direction.
02:21Right now, we are interviewing what we could call a general contractor or an integrator, one company.
02:27It's a massive project.
02:29The FAA is not qualified to manage this kind of a project, so we are now going through the process of finding who that one company will be to manage the whole project.
02:38We'll interview those companies together and make that selection.
02:42So we'll write one big, beautiful check to one beautiful company that will be responsible for this whole build.
02:48But if I could just make one last point.
02:52We are – this is not enough money.
02:53We're going to need more.
02:55But this is a massive new start.
02:57The biggest investment will need some more money on top of it.
03:00But a great start from the big, beautiful –
