It took Canada two years to replace paper flight strips with electronic ones in air traffic control towers, a simple transition to avoid cascading delays. In the United States, the same project has taken more than four decades, and it is still not complete.
The example highlights an irony. Despite handling the most flights in the world, America’s air traffic control systems — still using 1980s-era equipment and prone to widespread failures — have lagged behind some global peers when it comes to improving technology.
A key difference, aviation experts say, is that the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration relies on Congress to fund crucial upgrades, while other countries have privatized their air traffic control. That has meant more money, more consistently, to invest in improving systems in places like Canada and the European Union, both considered success stories in aviation management.
The F.A.A.’s issuing of a nationwide ground stop on Friday underscored America’s aging infrastructure, which experts have warned for years is in urgent need of modernizing, and which critics say has been chronically underfunded. For decades, U.S. air traffic communications have relied on a system that runs on analog copper wire, floppy disks and alphabetical keyboards so old that the F.A.A. has difficulty sourcing spare parts.
Speaking to reporters after the outage, Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, echoed those concerns, describing an air traffic control system stuck in the past, and demanding $50 billion from Congress to improve it.
“Canada and the European Union don’t have to worry about the public purse,” said John Gradek, an aviation management expert at McGill University. “They are masters of their own destiny.”
“The F.A.A. has been fighting this funding beast for decades and has to look for money at all times,” he added. “That is why they’re behind.”
America’s air traffic needs are complicated. The United States handles more flights and passengers than any other country, and does so over a large and complex geographic terrain. That means the advanced air traffic systems developed in Asia, like those of Korea, Malaysia or Singapore, are less useful as possible benchmarks than Canada or the European Union, Mr. Gradek said.
Canada became the first country in the world to privatize its air traffic control system, under a company called NAV Canada. Unlike the F.A.A., which relies on congressional appropriations, the company gets its money directly from airlines and airline customers. Many countries in Europe, including Germany and Switzerland, operate on hybrid public-private models that help finance a coordinated European Union traffic system. As in Canada, funding largely comes from users, not taxpayers.
This has allowed both Canada and the European Union to invest billions into updating systems without relying on lawmakers and to make headway on innovations like satellite-based tracking of flights. In Canada, the changes lowered prices for users and increased productivity, according to a July report by the Reason Foundation, a think tank.
A communications disruption set off by a copper-to-fiber upgrade at a remote site led to Friday’s shutdown, according to federal officials. Mr. Gradek pointed to that switch, which has proceeded in fits and starts for decades, as an example of how a difference in funding translates to a difference in how quickly things can get done.
America’s “25-year transition from copper wire to fiber is endemic to the type of organization that you have to fight for money every year to move this project one inch at a time,” he said.
Although the same upgrade is not entirely complete in Canada, according to NAV Canada, the majority of the work was finished in just 18 months, Mr. Gradek said.