AbstractDuring the next 10 years the Federal Aviation Administration will be modernizing its Air Traffic Control Towers (ATCTs) with advanced technology navigation, communication, and radar systems. There are a number of design strategies for technology transition under consideration. In this article, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used as a justification methodology to integrate and evaluate both quantitative and qualitative factors in this complex, multi‐attribute problem domain. Four alternative transition strategies are compared with respect to the criteria of cost, functionality during transition, difficulty of work during transition, efficiency of the final layout, and controller satisfaction in a hypothetical exampl