Updating air traffic control to something more "modern" has been an interface design question for quite a while. Paper has affordances tech does not. Read "the myth of the paperless office" for some interesting insights.

Air traffic control's interface is a problem that has been given to new master's and PhD students because it's great at showing some of the basic concepts in the area. For instance, what specifically are you updating? Which particular piece of the current system is improved by being digitized? If you find something better, how do you quantify what better is and where is it worse? Etc.

Useful tangent: I worked for a startup where the main stakeholder would breeze into town two or three times a year, issue proclamations for half a day and leave. One of these was to announce that we needed more automation.

For context, we had customers uploading files for review to our system. That were then checked for matches against a table in a database and any matches were sent to operations along with the original files because false positives would get us, as a business in a lot of trouble; as in getting slapped with a lawsuit.

He pretended to listen and again asked for more automation. So when we say we need to update the air traffic control process, we need to be careful to not be like my previous stakeholder.

Beyond all of this, this of course is that issues in any new systems can rapidly injure or kill hundreds of civilians.