The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has significantly increased the number of connections to Elon Musk’s Starlink that it’s testing in the hopes of bolstering an air traffic control system that has been beset by outages.

The FAA told Bloomberg that it’s now testing 41 Starlink connections — two in New Jersey, 28 in Alaska and 11 in Oklahoma. That’s up from eight connections the agency said it was testing at those locations in March.

The update comes amid a deepening feud between President Donald Trump and Musk over the president’s signature tax and spending package, which was signed into law last week.

The FAA said in a statement that the testing of Starlink, which is a division of Musk’s company SpaceX, in Alaska is occurring at “non-safety critical” sites “to restore stable access to weather information for pilots and the FAA’s flight services stations.” At the other two locations — in Oklahoma City and Atlantic City — the agency said it’s also assessing other technologies such as wireless.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has been pushing for a complete overhaul of the U.S. air traffic control system, including upgrades to the telecommunications infrastructure. Congress, in the president’s tax bill, provided the FAA with $12.5 billion to begin carrying out the modernization plans — a large chunk of which will go toward telecommunications.

The problems with the old system were underscored by recent outages at a facility in Philadelphia that left air traffic controllers who guide planes in and out of Newark Liberty International Airport temporarily unable to communicate with or see aircraft in the congested airspace.

Bloomberg News was the first to report in February that the FAA was testing the use of Starlink. Musk at the time said the existing system is “breaking down very rapidly” and that his Starlink terminals were being “sent at NO COST to the taxpayer on an emergency basis to restore air traffic control connectivity.”

Duffy in March said Starlink was potentially part of a broader solution for upgrading the FAA’s telecommunications network, which is critical for ensuring safe movement of plans and communication between pilots and air traffic controllers, but that the department still wanted to install new fiber-optic lines. However, he also criticized Verizon Communications Inc. for “not moving fast enough.”

In February, people familiar with the FAA’s plans told Bloomberg and other outlets that the agency was weighing canceling a $2.4 billion contract awarded to Verizon to replace aging copper wires with fiber-optic technology.

But the secretary has since softened his stance toward the company, complimenting Verizon on its quick work to install a new fiber-optic communications network between the Philadelphia facility that handles Newark traffic and a site in New York that previously oversaw that airspace. The Transportation Department announced last week that the FAA successfully transitioned to the new line.

The Starlink testing is being done through the FAA’s telecommunications infrastructure program, which is managed through a contract with L3Harris Technologies Inc., the agency said.

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