When did we decide efficiency was the goal of air traffic control? I want the thing to be effective and reliable, efficiency is way down the list here.
What you're referring to is a research project, not a deployable one.
I agree it's worth researching. Common industrial research grants with a mixture of government and private funding can perform the research and develop it.
And those improvements may be deployed to the sector whether it's private or not. There's no need to pre-emptively privatize the industry to perform R & D.
Perhaps efficiency was a bad word. The private sector is able to make changes and fix problems faster than the public sector. Easier to fire a bad controller, or fix a problem in a private environment.