The August 6th outage at Minneapolis Air Route Traffic Control Center wasn’t just a glitch. It was a preview. For two hours, radar and communications went dark across a nine-state, 330,000 square mile sector, disrupting more than 1,100 flights. Two days earlier, Marine One pilots couldn’t reach controllers at Reagan National, and a commercial plane took off closer than minimum safe distance. The FAA’s infrastructure is cracking under pressure, and 2025 became the worst year for flight delays in over a decade. One in four flights was delayed, diverted, or canceled. Tarmac delays jumped 64 percent. Nearly 2.4 million checked bags went lost or damaged on domestic flights alone.
Elon Musk was supposed to fix this. Last February, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy brought Musk and DOGE in to overhaul the FAA. Musk promised “rapid safety upgrades to the air traffic control system.” What actually happened? DOGE terminated 400 FAA employees, including maintenance technicians at 18 air traffic control centers, and delivered no major system upgrades. Musk wrongly accused Verizon of running the FAA’s communications network. Starlink never became the agency’s telecom provider. Air traffic controllers who spoke to The Verge on condition of anonymity say the agency’s most urgent needs remain on the personnel side, not the software side.
Now Peter Thiel’s Palantir is stepping into the vacuum. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act authorized $12.5 billion in supplemental FAA funding in July 2025, with roughly $5 billion earmarked for software upgrades. Palantir has no significant prior experience with air traffic control, but it’s already deeply integrated with FAA systems and surpassed $1 billion in federal contracts for the first time in 2025. It’s on track to exceed $1.5 billion in 2026. The company built the Maven AI targeting system used in Iran, a real-time mapping tool for ICE agents, and a search engine for Health and Human Services that helped cancel over $780 million in DEI-linked grants. It’s even working on a “mega-database” of US citizens.
None of the $12.5 billion goes toward hiring or retaining air traffic controllers. The controllers themselves are skeptical these contracts will fix what’s broken on the ground. The pattern here is hard to ignore: a wealthy donor’s efficiency crusade fails to deliver, and the administration’s answer is to hand the problem to another wealthy donor’s company. Whether Palantir’s data-sucking approach can stabilize the nation’s airspace is an open question. What’s already clear is that the money is moving in one direction.
