First, there was a series of close calls on airport runways across the country. Then, a devastating crash involving a commercial plane and an Army helicopter near Reagan Washington National Airport claimed the lives of 67 people.

Now, a sequence of Air Traffic Control outages at Newark Liberty International Airport, in addition to outages in Denver and Atlanta, have Americans wondering: What’s going on with air travel?

“We are facing a crisis,” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, told Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing this past week.

Duffy has urged lawmakers to provide his department with enough money to modernize what all have agreed is a dangerously outdated Air Traffic Control system. He asked lawmakers controlling the purse strings to determine the price tag — which some experts said could be in the of range of tens of billions of dollars — and to provide all the money up front.

“The system we currently use, it truly is 25, 35, 40 years old in some places. We should have paid way more attention to it as a country. We’ve let it age and now we’re seeing the cracks of that age play out in real time for us,” Duffy said.

He also asked Congress to reform permitting regulations so contractors aren’t slowed down by red tape.

An eight-page framework recently released by the Transportation Department would improve radio systems controllers use to talk with pilots, upgrade copper wiring with fiber optics and update degrading air-traffic control facilities at airports across the U.S.

Seventy-six percent of the FAA’s 138 Air Traffic Control systems were found to be unsustainable or potentially unsustainable, according to findings from the Government Accountability Office last fall.

“We do try to buy replacement parts on eBay for this really old equipment. Sometimes we can’t even find it on eBay, so we’re trying to use 3D printing to craft replacement parts for the system that we use,” Duffy said.

The secretary did stress, however, that he believed it is safe to fly.

“Even the frustrations in Newark, when we’ve slowed traffic down, the key is not efficiency, the key is safety,” he said.

Delays at Newark this past week were due in part to there being just three air traffic controllers, compared to the staffing target of 14, the New York Times reported.

“I think the Air Traffic Control shortage is critical. We’re 3,000 short. We’ve been 3,000 short for some time,” Duffy said.

The Department of Transportation has explored ways to quicken education and training for future air traffic controllers through expedited medical testing and additional tutoring. Once a candidate completes instruction at the FAA Academy, Duffy told senators, it takes between one and three years before they are fully trained.

To keep staff on the job longer, controllers who are eligible for retirement after 25 years of service can now receive a 20% bonus to stay on the job.

Have a news tip? Contact Ahtra Elnashar at aelnashar@sbgtv.com.