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Air Traffic System Is Outdated and Politicized

bob.poole@reason.org (Robert Poole) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:34:00 EST

Early Thursday morning a computer glitch disrupted the nation’s system which handles flight plan processing for air traffic controllers. For nearly four hours, flight plans filed by many pilots had to be entered into the National Airspace Data Interchange Network by hand. The problem occurred at the FAA Telecommunications Infrastructure center in Salt Lake City, and then the other center (in Atlanta) could not handle the workload by itself. Because planes cannot take off until their flight plans are in the system, the result was long delays for travelers thanks to the backlog caused by the manual entry of flight plans.

If you think this sounds familiar, you’re right. In August 2008, there was a similar failure at the Atlanta facility, with similar delays. And there were two such outages in September of this year, one at both locations and the other just at Salt Lake City. The big question is why these delays keep happening.

These problems are symptoms of an institutional structure that, despite some well-meaning reforms this decade, still cannot get the job done well. Consider that the old radar technology the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) uses to navigate $200 million jets is far less advanced than the GPS technology drivers can use to navigate $20,000 cars.

If air traffic control were being operated as a business, responsible to its paying customers, it’s inconceivable that there would not be 100 percent backup for the vital flight plan filing centers that caused these delays. At the very least, if one center goes down, the other should have the capacity to handle the full workload. More broadly, these problems reflect a system whose funding and governance does not make sense for a high-tech, 24/7 service business like the country’s aviation system.

The FAA is under way on what is projected to be a 20-year top-to-bottom revamp of the way it controls air traffic. Called NextGen, this new approach will largely replace ground-based radars and other navigation aids with GPS navigation, digital communications (rather than voice, for routine messages), and replace many routine manual operations with more automation. The cost is estimated at $20 billion for FAA equipment and facilities and up to another $20 billion for those who operate planes in U.S. airspace to equip aircraft with the necessary gear. While everyone supports this modernization in principle, it is correctly judged to be a “high-risk” endeavor by the Government Accountability Office. The FAA has a long track record of bringing in new technologies late and way over budget, though modest reforms this decade have actually made some improvements on recent projects.

The underlying air traffic problem is the mismatch between the system’s tax-funded, government bureaucracy and the needs of a high-tech service business.

In most businesses, a major technological paradigm shift, like that needed by our air traffic system, would be worked out and justified by the company and its customers, with a solid business case for making each investment, and mutual agreement on the schedule—so that customers don’t buy their gear way before the company is ready with its new facilities and equipment. And based on the customers’ willingness to pay, the company could go to the capital markets to raise the $20 billion in a timely manner. It could also crack the whip on program managers and contractors to get the projects done on-time and on-budget.

The FAA can’t do any of that.

It gets its capital budget in dribs and drabs from annual congressional appropriations, along with generous amounts of “oversight” (otherwise known as micromanagement). The current “reauthorization” of the FAA budget is over two years late, making any kind of long-term capital planning problematic. Plus, in calling the shots, Congress tends to resist cost-saving, productivity-improving measures such as automation and facility consolidation in the interest of preserving jobs in members’ districts. But without those kinds of changes, much of the increased-productivity benefits of the new technology go away.

Former Vice President Al Gore and a half-dozen national commissions have called for changing this model—making the FAA’s Air Traffic Organization a self-supporting business unit paid directly by its aviation customers and able to go to the bond market for capital funding. So far, none of these recommendations has gained any traction. Until they do, we are likely to be stuck with a status-quo that leads to outages, cost overruns, delays in new technology, and chronic delays for air travelers.

Air Traffic Control Reform Newsletter

Our Air Traffic Control System Is Outdated and Wasteful

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:12:00 EST

As the holiday travel rush approaches, air travelers grounded by delays should take a moment to think about why they're stuck in airports or on the tarmac. There's a good chance Washington is to blame.

"The air traffic control system in the United States is technologically obsolete," says Robert W. Poole, Jr., director of transportation studies at Reason Foundation. "This model is basically the same model that we have used since the beginning of air travel."

The technology the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) uses to navigate $200 million jets is less advanced than the GPS technology drivers use to navigate $20,000 cars.

Poole says the system could safely handle more planes if the FAA used modern technology that would provide real-time information about where planes are. But the funding process, overseen by pork-hungry members of Congress, often thwarts technology upgrades.

The only way to get the politics out of our air traffic system is to take the system away from the politicians. Why not let a private corporation manage the skies?

That may sound like a far-out, free-market idea, but Canada doesn't think so.

Our neighbors to the north often take pride in their lavish government programs, yet they allow a private corporation called Nav Canada to manage their air-traffic control system. Canada's approach, often called commercialization, has some surprising supporters in the U.S., including Al Gore, who pushed for commercialization when he was Bill Clinton's vice president.

"Your Flight Has Been Delayed" is written and produced by Ted Balaker. Director of Photography: Alex Manning; Field Producers: Paul Detrick and Hawk Jensen. The host is Nick Gillespie.

Approximately 7.28 minutes. Go here for embed code and downloadable versions.

Reason's Air Traffic Control Research

Poole's Air Traffic Control Reform Newsletter

Your Flight Has Been Delayed -And It's Washington's Fault

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:00:00 EST

The technology the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) uses to navigate $200 million jets is less advanced than the GPS technology drivers use to navigate $20,000 cars.

The only way to get the politics out of our air traffic system is to take the system away from the politicians. Why not let a private corporation manage the skies?

That may sound like a far-out, free-market idea, but Canada doesn't think so.

"Your Flight Has Been Delayed" is written and produced by Ted Balaker. Director of Photography: Alex Manning; Field Producers: Paul Detrick and Hawk Jensen. The host is Nick Gillespie.

Approximately 7.28 minutes. Go here for embed code and downloadable versions.

To subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube channel, go here.

Bob Poole (Quoted by Steve Forbes) Has It Right: Airline Deregulation is not to Blame

shirley.ybarra@reason.org (Shirley Ybarra) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:00:00 EST

In a book by Steve Forbes and Elizabeth Ames, How Capitalism Will Save Us, Why Free Markets and Free People Are the Best Answer, the question was asked: Didn’t deregulation wreck the airline industry? The resounding answer is NO! It actually greatly benefitted consumers. As the a short version in an article concludes: Airline deregulation actually has made service cheaper and more abundant. Adjusted for inflation, fares today are 25 percent to 44.9 percent lower than they were before deregulation three decades ago. Carriers offer far more service to more cities. And studies show travel is safer, too.

In the course of describing the situation (accurately) the authors use an article in 'Regulation Magazine" by (Reason’s own) Bob Poole, Jr. and Viggo Butler where they explain:

… government management of our airports and air-traffic-control systems has produced an antiquated, inefficient infrastructure unequipped to handle the explosion of air travel resulting from deregulation.
Government-run airports, for example, are unable to use market-based methods to reduce airport congestion--such as using peak pricing to direct some usage by carriers into off-hours. This would not only cut down on overcrowded terminals, it would generate much-needed fees to finance expansion and technological improvements both in air traffic control and in airport facilities
…the misery of today's air travel is largely caused by an air-traffic-control system that relies on outdated 1950s technology. Only recently did the FAA announce that it would phase in more sophisticated NextGen air-traffic-control systems that use the kind of GPS satellite navigation technology consumers have had for years in passenger cars. The new systems would enable airports to handle at least twice as much traffic.
NextGen technology has existed for years. But the system has been bogged down in political debate. Not having to account to consumers, bureaucrats, as always, take their time at taxpayer expense. NextGen isn't expected to be fully in use until about 2025, at a total cost of some $35 billion.
Other countries already have more efficient, up-to-date air-traffic-control systems than the United States because they have given the management of airports and air-traffic-control systems to nonprofit corporations under industry control--and out of the hands of politically interested government bureaucrats.

Hence the accurate concluding comment which Bob Poole has written about many times over: "The real problem in the United States isn't our airline traffic jam. It's the bureaucratic bottleneck in Washington."

See other articles by Bob Poole, Jr. at http://reason.org/areas/topic/air-traffic-control

Air Traffic Control Reform Newsletter #67

bob.poole@reason.org (Robert Poole) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EDT

In this issue:

Wide-Area Multilateration Can Replace Radars
FAA and Airline "Customers"
Digital Communications Back on Track
ATC Revenue and User Fees
GPS Backup Still Lacking
News Notes
Quotable Quotes

Wide-Area Multilateration: Replacement for Secondary Radars

News stories last month announced a development in Colorado that is more important than non-aviation journalists realized. A wide-area multilateration (WAM) system went into full-scale operation in the mountainous area where four airports are located-Yampa Valley, Garfield County, Steamboat Springs, and Craig-Moffat County. Due to the mountainous terrain, there are serious gaps in radar coverage below 13,000 feet, which drastically reduced flight operations during reduced-visibility conditions. But with the new WAM system up and running, controllers at Denver Center can provide normal radar-like separations to planes flying in that airspace.

Multilateration refers to a kind of triangulation, based on measuring differences in the time of arrival of signals from a plane's transponder to sensors at various known locations. It's been used for years in airport surface surveillance systems like ASDE-X, both here and overseas. Wide-area MLat uses a larger array of ground-based sensors; in the case of the new Colorado system, there are 20 of them. They continually listen for signals from planes' transponders and (if so equipped) their ADS-B equipment. A central unit computes the plane's position and sends it to the appropriate ATC center, where it's displayed on the controller's screen just as if it had come from a traditional secondary surveillance radar (SSR).

But as Tony LoBrutto of Sensis Corporation (whose company produced the system installed in Colorado) notes, there are three important differences between SSR and MLat. First, MLat is significantly more accurate than SSR, primarily because its updates occur once per second rather than once every 6 to 12 seconds, and it is not subject to some of SSR's inherent inaccuracies. Second, it is significantly less costly than SSR, both to acquire and to maintain. Third, MLat can handle ADS-B signals, which SSR cannot. Hence, it can provide a backup and integrity check for ADS-B.

Although the Colorado installation is the first WAM application in the United States (and will be expanded to areas served by seven additional airports), air navigation service providers in Austria, the Czech Republic, Fiji and South Africa are already well along on replacing SSR with WAM. Sensis and arch-rival Era Corp. (a subsidiary of SRA International) are involved in these and other MLat projects worldwide. The Czech Republic is one of the pioneers, with two Era WAM systems in operation and a third under contract. They will cover the country's entire airspace, handling all en-route traffic from a single facility near Prague, when linked together in 2010. Since they are being certified to at least equal the capabilities of SSR, under Eurocontrol rules the air navigation service provider (ANS CR) can use the same aircraft spacings as with SSR (5 nm. en-route and 3 nm. terminal). ANS CR plans to phase out its SSRs over a period of 10-15 years.

Fiji is also under way with an Era WAM and ADS-B system for the entire Fiji Flight Information Region. It will replace the current air traffic management system for both en-route operations and at the control towers of Nadi and Nausori International Airports. If commissioned on schedule next year, this will make Fiji the first country whose entire system will be non-radar based but of advanced technology. South Africa in February commissioned Era WAM systems for terminal and en-route air traffic management within 60 naut.mi. of both Cape Town and Johannesburg airports.

If WAM is so much better than SSR, should air navigation service providers whose SSRs are wearing out buy new ones? Era's Russell Hulstrom maintains they should not. In an article in Air Traffic Management last year, he suggested that shifting to WAM instead of SSRs will provide a smooth transition to an eventual ADS-B system, which he terms ADS-X (WAM plus ADS-B). Radars cannot track ADS-B equipped planes, but WAM can. And if the WAM system uses a clock timing system independent of GPS, it can also serve as a backup for ADS-B on an ongoing basis.

There has apparently been a fairly long-standing culture clash within FAA and other ANSPs between the "radar mafia" and advocates of MLat. It looks to me as if MLat is starting to win, and that bodes well for a safer and more affordable air navigation system.

FAA and Airline "Customers"

Responding to criticisms, from Congress and the media, that it has gotten too close to the airline industry, FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt in mid-September announced that the agency will no longer refer to the airlines as its "customers." Instead, that term will be reserved for members of the flying public.

This change in terminology illustrates the schizophrenic nature of the FAA as presently constituted. In its identity as the nation's aviation safety regulator, the decision is absolutely correct. The entities that are subject to its safety regulation are and should be at arm's length from their regulators, and calling those regulatees "customers" sends the wrong message to the airlines, pilots, mechanics, flight schools, airports, and airframe and engine producers that it regulates, as well as to its own safety regulatory staff.

However, this change is exactly wrong for the agency's largest branch, the Air Traffic Organization. The ATO is an "air navigation service provider" (ANSP), and as such, it has customers: those who operate aircraft in the airspace under its control. Creating the ATO early this decade was a big step forward for the FAA, clarifying roles and responsibilities by consolidating the agency's air traffic operations and its "facilities and equipment" branch into a single, dare I say, corporate entity aimed at serving its customers.

Just about every other civilized modern western country has gone further, by organizationally separating its ANSP from its aviation safety regulator. The ANSP is typically made self-supporting via fees and charges paid by its customers, while the air safety regulator typically remains within the transport ministry, funded by general government tax revenues. This model has proven itself over the last decade in country after country, improving both air safety (by providing truly arm's length safety regulation) and air traffic management (by depoliticizing the ANSP and making it more responsive to its customers).

Administrator Babbitt knows about this track record, having served on the advisory board of the best multi-country study of the before-and-after performance of 10 leading ANSPs, "Air Traffic Control Commercialization Policy: Has it Been Effective?" produced by MBS Ottawa and George Mason University, Syracuse University, and McGill University in 2005 and released in January 2006. (www.mbsottawa.com/current.htm) I hope he will issue a clarification, explaining that this new policy does not apply to the ATO.

Digital Communications Back on Track

Way back in mid-2003, the FAA abruptly dropped a promising program called Controller-Pilot Data Link Communications (CPDLC), despite a successful trial run involving American Airlines in South Florida. Shifting routine air-ground communications from VHF voice radio to digital communications (text messages) was and is viewed as a key building block for NextGen, and the FAA decision to put the program on indefinite hold baffled many observers.

The good news is that digital communications is back, in both Europe and the USA. Still called CPDLC in Europe, it was officially mandated by the European Commission in January 2009, for EU air navigation service providers and aircraft flying above 28,500 feet within Europe. For Western Europe, the implementation deadline is February 2013 and for Eastern Europe, February 2015. The aim is to achieve at least 75% equipage in each region by the deadline dates, since most aircraft operators will want to operate at or above 28,500 ft.

The new EU regulation specifies that data link equipment must comply with ICAO standards for controller pilot data link communications. This will permit long-haul aircraft already equipped with FANS-1/A equipment to use its datalink function, while other aircraft may have to add new equipment compliant with ICAO-standard ATN/VDL communications.

The EU action may have inspired the RTCA Task Force that I wrote about last month to include Digital ATC-Aircraft Communications as one of its key near-term ("Now-Gen") recommendations. Data link would be used for departure clearances, re-routes, and routine communications, with implementation beginning this year and proceeding through 2014. Like the EU plan, the RTCA recommendation calls for using already in-place FANS-1/A equipment on long-haul planes and ATN Baseline 1 equipment for other aircraft (including regional jets), which would have to equip by 2014. All Centers would be equipped by 2014, as would larger commercial airport towers. Since FAA does have a similar plan in the works (Segment 1 of its Data Comm program), Task Force members are hoping for timely FAA approval of this recommendation to expedite Segment 1. The RTCA report notes that "initial analysis by flight operator financial executives has shown a conservative ROI payback period of approximately 2.8 years."

ATC Revenue and User Fees

The October 21 issue of Aviation Daily had two apparently unrelated articles on page 2. One was headlined "Yield Decline Worsens in September, ATA Says." The other was captioned "House Lawmakers Caution White House Against User Fees." Let me attempt to connect the dots here.

The first article reflects the latest data compiled by the Air Transport Association on month-by-month "yield" figures-airline revenue in cents per revenue passenger mile (RPM) from air service in four regions (Domestic, Atlantic, Latin America, and Pacific). Overall, yields were down 18% year-on-year, reflecting the 10th consecutive month of fare decreases. The graph on p. 7 of that same issue shows yields from January 2007 through September 2009. Domestic yield averaged about 13.6¢/RPM in January 2007, with a gradual uptrend peaking in summer 2008 at just over 16¢/RPM. Domestic yields have plunged since then to 13.3¢/RPM in September 2009.

This matters for ATC funding, because the single largest source of revenue for the Aviation Trust Fund is the 7.5% tax on airline tickets. Large declines in that source of revenue mean budget squeezes for the FAA overall, and especially for the ATO. The ATO budget is already under pressure due to the increased payroll costs that will occur thanks to the recent contract agreement with controllers' union NATCA. Higher operating costs and lower revenue will mean budget cuts somewhere-and most likely in capital investment (i.e., modernization, also known as NextGen).

In recent years, the FAA itself (under Marion Blakey), the GAO, and the DOT Inspector General have all pointed out that a revenue system based on the price of airline tickets bears less and less relation to ATC costs as time goes on. The FAA, in particular, in its FY2007 budget proposal, laid out a sweeping funding reform, that would have ATC users pay for ATC services via user fees and the airport grant program via a user tax, with the federal general fund covering FAA safety regulatory activities. That proposal, alas, was dead on arrival in Congress.

Some of us cheered when we saw the Obama Administration's initial budget projections, calling for a shift to largely user-fee funding for the FAA starting in FY 2011 (with an estimated $9.6 billion coming from that source). Needless to say, that has set off the usual anti-user-fee campaign among general aviation groups, primarily AOPA (representing mostly individual private pilots). As of this week, they have recruited 118 House members, from both parties, to sign onto their a letter to President Obama calling for the user fee plan to be dropped. The letter urges continuation of status-quo funding, ignoring how out-of-sync that funding is with the factors that drive ATC costs.

The last thing we need is another war between the airlines and business/general aviation over user fees. But we do need to put the ATO on a sustainable funding path, especially with the major capital investments it needs to make on NextGen, which will improve flying for everyone. That sustainable funding path almost certainly must involve the users of Centers and TRACONs paying for the services they get-but in a way that does not impose burdensome administrative costs or put small-plane owners out of business. Canada succeeded in threading this needle when it created the funding system for Nav Canada more than a decade ago. As the Administration works to flesh out its user fee proposal, it would be wise to use the Nav Canada model as a starting point.

GPS Backup Still Lacking

A very sobering article appears as the cover story of the October 2009 issue of Avionics: "Fixing GPs," by Callan James. (www.aviationtoday.com/av/categories/military/35197.htm) James summarizes the Government Accountability Office's assessment, earlier this year, of the vulnerability of the GPS constellation to some of the existing satellites wearing out before enough replacements can be built and launched. (www.gao.gov/new.items/d09325.pdf) But his principal focus is the congressional testimony last May by Prof. Brad Parkinson of Stanford University. Prior to entering academia, Col. Parkinson was the USAF's chief architect of GPS and its original program manager, causing him to be widely known as the Father of GPS.

Parkinson outlined four possible approaches to mitigate (i.e., make less severe) a possible GPS "brownout," due to fewer than necessary satellites being operational. One would be to reactivate five of the satellites that are currently shut down because their solar panels can no longer handle the power-hungry DOD nuclear detection functions-but could still provide civil navigation signals (though their remaining lifespan may be short). Another would be to accelerate the development of the next-generation GPS III satellites, which are far more powerful than the existing ones. But that would take money from other DOD programs, so is not very likely. A third alternative would be to launch some simplified versions of GPS III, sans the military nuclear detection functions-which the military is unlikely to favor. Last-and least good-would be to add more GPS IIF satellites to the current late and over-budget contract, which Parkinson himself said would "be both expensive and risky while not meeting [full] operational requirements."

That, of course, leaves us with getting a back-up system in place, such as eLoran that I've written about in previous issues of this newsletter. It turns out that it was none other than Brad Parkinson who chaired the independent panel of experts (the Independent Assessment Team) that studied the problem for the Departments of Homeland Security and Transportation in 2007 and unanimously recommended eLoran as the best available backup for GPS. That recommendation was accepted by both agencies, and DHS announced in February 2008 that it would begin implementing eLoran as the GPS backup.

But then everything seemed to disappear into a black hole. The report disappeared from public view, and I'm told that the Office of Management & Budget continued its long-time effort to zero out funding for the Loran program-including eLoran. And language to that effect was included in the Obama Administration's initial budget proposal. The report itself was only unearthed via a Freedom of Information Act request earlier this year, and several members of Congress took up the cause of reviving eLoran as the GPS backup.

The latest news is that the DHS appropriations bill approved by a House-Senate conference committee this month allows for termination of Loran-C signals on Jan. 4, 2010 if the Coast Guard (which operates Loran) certifies that the signal is not needed for navigation and if DHS certifies that it is not needed as the GPS backup. Let's hope DHS gets this one right!

News Notes

Naverus Certified for Public-Use RNP Procedures
The company that pioneered development of precision approaches for airlines such as Alaska and Southwest, Naverus, received FAA certification last month to develop such approaches for public use at airports. Naverus has designed over 300 approaches that can be used by aircraft equipped for Required Navigation Performance (RNP)-in Canada, the United States, and other countries. Until now, public-use RNP procedures had been developed only by the FAA. The FAA's decision to allow third-party developers should speed the introduction of such approaches.

CANSO Launches Middle East Region
The Civil Air Navigation Services Organization (CANSO) has launched a new region encompassing the Middle East, reflecting the growth of interest in upgrading ATC in that part of the world. CANSO held its first conference in the region in January 2009, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and its board approved creation of the new region at its annual meeting in July. Thus far, two of the region's Middle Eastern air navigation service providers are full members of the organization, GACA (Saudi Arabia) and NANSC (Egypt).

ATC Still on Inspector General's Problem List
The DOT Office of Inspector General (OIG) produces a list each year of the DOT's top management challenges-and once again, ATC modernization has made the list. Specifically, the OIG defined the problem as "moving toward the next generation air transportation system and improving the national airspace system's performance." The FAA's second appearance on the list concerns air safety regulation: "strengthening aviation's regulatory framework for safety and addressing human factors." As I have written many times before, the strongest step DOT could take in this regard would be to separate the FAA's air safety regulation organization from its ATC operation (the ATO), putting safety regulation truly at arm's length from ATC operations, as is true for all other aspects of aviation.

JPDO Releases New Documents
Early this month, the Joint Planning & Development Office (the interagency group responsible for longer-term research and planning of NextGen) on Oct. 2, 2009 released several new reports, including a revised Integrated Work Plan, NextGen Enterprise Architecture, and enhancements to its Joint Planning Environment. Go to: www.jpdo.gov/newsArticle.asp?id=121.

Belgium Ripping Off Air Travelers
One of the basic principles of commercialized air navigation service providers is financial autonomy-i.e., that the ANSP raises its own budget from the fees it charges for its services. But the government of Belgium is violating that principle when it comes to its allegedly commercialized ANSP, Belgocontrol. In each of the two latest fiscal years, the Belgian government has diverted €20 million from the ANSP to its own general government budget. The Association of European Airlines has rightly protested this ripoff, which is forcing airlines (and hence their passengers) to help cover the government's budget deficit. This kind of thing calls into question the viability of the commercialization model under which the ANSP remains 100% government-owned.

Quotable Quotes

"The Czech strategy is to provide air traffic surveillance at least 20 naut. mi. beyond its own borders. It may be possible for Poland or Austria or another neighbor to make use of aircraft tracking data from [Czech provider] ANS CR when deciding whether or not to replace aging secondary surveillance radars in their own countries. The fact that multilateration makes it easy to share surveillance data means it's a good tool to facilitate cross-border cooperation envisioned in the Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR) modernization effort."
--David Hughes, "An Alternative to Radar," Aviation Week, October 20, 2008.

"I passionately believe that in 2020 no one will buy secondary surveillance radars. We will have crossed the threshold and our ANSPs and airspace designers will be able to improve safety, increase capacity, reduce fuel consumption, and decrease greenhouse gas emissions in ways that were never possible with secondary radar."
--Russell Hulstrom, SRA Air Traffic Systems, "Why Buy SSR Any Longer?" Air Traffic Management, Issue 4 2008 (www.airtrafficmanagement.net)

"How likely and how serious is the threat of future GPS brownouts? As one senior industry official told Avionics, 'If Brad Parkinson says there's a threat, you'd better believe him, no matter what the DOD says.' . . . Parkinson noted that 'GPS is so much a part of today's embedded infrastructure that brownouts must be avoided.' But he cautioned that 'To avoid this risk will require the best efforts of DOD, Congress, the GPS Program Office, the Air Force Space Command, and the contractors.'"
--Callan James, "Fixing GPS," Avionics, October 2009.

Air Traffic Control Reform Newsletter #66

bob.poole@reason.org (Robert Poole) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 00:00:00 EDT

In this issue:

RTCA Provides NextGen Reality Check
Controller Fatigue, continued
Progress with 4-D Trajectories
Business Aviation as Business Tool
Progress on Controllers
Upcoming Conferences
News Notes
Quotable Quotes

RTCA Task Force 5: A Bracing Reality Check

Air Traffic Organization (ATO) chief Hank Krakowski did good back in January when he asked the aviation advisory body RTCA to create a special task force to develop consensus recommendations on medium-term NextGen implementation (defined as between now and 2018). RTCA Task Force 5 was established to thrash out the issues of what specific actions should be taken by whom and at what points in time, for the early stages of shifting to the NextGen paradigm-and doing so in a way that makes business sense to those who operate aircraft in the system. In effect, this is the task that a stakeholder board of directors would be doing, were the ATO set up as a business (such as Nav Canada).

The just-released report provides a sobering look at how the customers view the plans for transitioning to NextGen. Given the problem of making significant investments prior to being able to realize significant operational benefits from them, the Task Force put considerable emphasis on figuring out which proposed operational capabilities could begin by using existing equipment on planes, if the ATO changed procedures and provided more training. It also looked into possible ways in which incentives could be offered for aircraft operators to add on-board equipment sooner than they otherwise might. One kind of incentive is financial-low-interest loans, discounts on existing aviation user taxes, etc. But another key emphasis in the report is expansion of the principle of "best-equipped, best-served" as opposed to the traditional "first-come, first-served."

Since I criticized the current Senate FAA reauthorization bill (in the previous issue of this newsletter) for imposing costly and arbitrary equipage deadlines for ADS-B, I was interested to see the Task Force's assessment that the payback period for relatively low-cost ADS-B/Out is considered "long," and payback for the far more expensive ADS-B/In is considered very long. By contrast, digital data communications between pilots and controllers got considerable emphasis as both relatively low-cost and providing a short payback period. The report also puts a lot of emphasis on increasing runway operational capacity, especially for closely spaced parallel runways, increased use of time-based metering (see story below on 4-D trajectories), and greater use of precision navigation such as RNAV/RNP.

It is especially gratifying to see, in tables of recommendations in each functional area, the specific aviation customers willing to pursue implementation (and in many cases, for specific airports or portions of airspace). This includes not only most major airlines but also, in various cases, fractional operator NetJets, NBAA, and in some cases AOPA. And on those recommendations where some of these parties declined participation, they are not objecting to the others moving forward.

Nearly 300 aviation stakeholders took part in this effort, and I'm sure a great many people will be poring over this report for months to come. Since Task Force 5 is only an advisory body, not the ATO's board of directors, what it has produced is only a set of recommendations. But under the current governance and funding arrangements, getting this kind of consensus on how to move forward is a big deal.

Controller Fatigue, Continued

Recent news stories have documented the FAA's current efforts to revise decades-old duty-time rules for airline pilots. A key problem is the limited amount of sleep some pilots get between shifts, which can produce fatigue leading to fatal accidents-such as that of Colgan Air Flight 3407 near Buffalo, NY last February. I'm glad to see the FAA taking action on this. But the equally serious problem of controller fatigue that I wrote about last issue seems to be getting zero real attention.

My article did prompt several vigorous responses. Retired air traffic supervisor Tom Bonacki took his former employer and the controllers union to task for ignoring the issue. "If both sides cared about safety, they could mandate a minimum time off between shifts, say 10 hours. The FARs [federal air regulations] have for years mentioned eight hours between shifts as a minimum; what stops bargainers from going beyond that minimum?"

I also heard from former controller Thomas Anthony, now director of the Aviation Safety and Security Program at the University of Southern California. He sent me a copy of his chilling article, "Wake Me When My Shift Is Over," recently published in the Flight Safety Foundation's magazine AeroSafetyWorld. (www.flightsafety.org/asw/mar09/asw_mar09_p19-21.pdf) He tells me the 2-2-1 shift I discussed last month (swing-swing-day-day-midnight) is known to controllers as "the rattler," because it can double back and bite those who work it.

In the article Anthony summarizes the science that underlies the decrease in performance due to sleep loss and fatigue. The worst combination is an upset to circadian rhythm, acute sleep loss, and chronic sleep loss-exactly the combination produced by the rattler. He recounts his personal experience, as a controller in the 1980s, working this shift schedule and coping with its severe effects. He says flat-out that this type of shift schedule should be abolished.

At least two alternatives exist. As Anthony notes, the Air Force encountered this fatigue problem with fighter pilots doing midnight runs in Vietnam. Their solution was to schedule three straight midnight shifts, separated by days off on either side. And Bonacki notes that when he began with the FAA at JFK tower in 1970s, "Our shifts were a week of swings, a week of days, a week of swings, a week of days, then a week of mids."

Yet in the face of all the evidence, why does the dangerous 2-2-1 shift schedule continue? Bonacki faults FAA leadership for ignoring the issue and controller union leadership for letting member desires for longer weekends conflict with safety. But I still ask why? Especially when the FAA is now moving to change airline pilot scheduling practices to address the very same type of fatigue issue.

I think the answer goes back to the FAA's built-in conflict of interest. When it comes to airlines, the FAA is legally at arm's length from those it regulates-and the same is true for private pilots, aviation mechanics, repair stations, airframe manufacturers, etc. But in the case of controllers, the FAA is essentially "regulating" itself. If the ATC provider (the Air Traffic Organization) were a separate entity, the FAA would become a true air safety regulator, with the same arm's length separation from all those it regulates. It's high time we seriously pursued this change.

Progress on 4-D Trajectories

One of the key concepts of the new air traffic management paradigm being pursued under NextGen in the United States and SESAR in Europe is managing air traffic in four-rather than three-dimensions. The fourth dimension is time. The key insight is that since we now have the technology to keep track far more precisely of where each plane is in three dimensions, in real time, it should be possible to define an optimized flight path for each aircraft, using precise timing as well as precise positional data.

That's the basic idea behind four-dimensional (4-D) trajectories. I've previously written about Continuous Descent Approaches (CDAs), which is the application of these ideas to the descent and landing phase of flight. More recently, the same ideas are being applied to the ascent phase-take-off and climb. In Denmark, air navigation services provider Naviair has spent more than a decade developing Continuous Climb Departures (CCDs) from Copenhagen airport. Under this procedure, the plane is given an optimized flight path to climb continuously from take-off to cruise altitude, rather than having to level off at intermediate altitudes before climbing again. As with CDAs, CCDs save fuel, which also reduces CO2 emissions. Recent simulations by Eurocontrol show that use of CCDs for all departures from Copenhagen would save 10,000 tons of fuel and 32,000 tons of CO2 per year.

The FAA's Air Traffic Organization is rolling out a 4-D tool called Traffic Management Advisor (TMA). Its primary aim is to avoid extra vectoring (to properly sequence planes for landing) when planes near the destination airport. It works by adjusting aircraft speed en-route, to be sure that planes headed toward that airport arrive in the proper sequence. The process begins at departure, when the departure time is entered into the system and software takes into account winds, weather, and other traffic to provide timed guidance for the flight en-route. Thus far, TMA is only operational in some sectors, so its full benefits will not be realized until it is fully operational nationwide.

And starting this fall, Embry Riddle University and the FAA will be doing flight demonstrations of a new on-board flight management system computer designed specifically for 4-D trajectory-based operations.

Business Aviation as a Business Tool

After all the bad press given to business jet use by large corporations earlier this year, somebody needed to take an analytical look at the industry's claims that the use of business aircraft is a vital business tool, rather than a luxury indulgence. Such a study has just been released, by NEXA Advisors, LLC, a consulting firm headed by former Arthur Andersen consultant Michael J. Dyment. "Business Aviation in a Changing Economy" was sponsored by the General Aviation Manufacturers Association, the National Business Aviation Association, Aviation Week, and others.

I have not read the study itself, and am relying here on a summary article in Aviation Week (Sept. 7, 2009). Based on that summary, it appears to be a credible and well-done piece of work.

The key question examined by the NEXA study is whether companies in the S&P 500 that use business aviation (via owning or leasing planes, using fractional providers, or chartering regularly) outperform companies that do not. So the researchers separated the data into 322 "user" companies and 101 "non-users." (The total is less than 500 due to mergers, etc. during the 2003-07 study period; the 423 companies are those in stand-alone existence for the entire period.)

Overall, the study found that companies that use business aviation had better performance on a wide variety of measures: 5-year cumulative annual growth in revenue, in net income, in stock appreciation, return on equity, return on assets, etc. To supplement those data, the study also examined non-financial data sources, specifically lists of "best" companies compiled by various organizations, such as: Business Week's 50 Most Innovative Companies, Fortune's 100 Best Places to Work, and the 100 Best Corporate Citizens, as defined by the Corporate Responsibility officers Association. In each case, the user companies outnumbered the non-user companies on such lists (though this might be due to the 3:1 ratio of users to non-users in the data set).

I'm not surprised by these results, since it seems to me the case for business aviation as a means of time-saving and greater efficiency is a strong one. My only beef with NBAA and its allies is their continued opposition to paying their way in using airports and air traffic control, costs which they could readily afford and which would not significantly undermine the economics of using business jets and turboprops. For details, see my 2006 Reason policy study, "Business Jets and ATC User Fees: Taking a Closer Look."
(http://reason.org/news/show/business-jets-and-atc-user-fee)

Progress in Controller/ATO Relations

It's no news to anyone that the FAA and its ATC division, the Air Traffic Organization, have long had a difficult relationship with their air traffic controller employees. The Obama administration came into office promising to fix the most pressing sore point-the contract with controllers' union NATCA that the ATO imposed, per rules established by Congress, after negotiations on a new contract broke down in 2006. This summer, that effort succeeded, when union leaders and the ATO reached agreement on nearly all the issues, and the final three were settled by a binding arbitration panel. Assuming the membership ratifies the new contract, that sore point should no longer poison labor/management relations at the ATO.

More significant for the future, I think, is a separate effort to change the "almost militaristic approach" that has long characterized many aspects of labor/management relations, exemplified in the punitive approach to dealing with operational errors in air traffic control. For many years now at overseas air navigation service provides, the emphasis has been on creating a "just culture," in which an error is treated as a safety problem and the emphasis is on figuring out what went wrong and how to prevent similar occurrences. In this country, the approach has been a punitive one, with the emphasis on affixing blame. Needless to say, this kind of approach does not necessarily produce safety improvements.

In April 2008 the ATO and FAA's Air Traffic Safety Oversight Service (AOV) reached agreement with NATCA on a change in approach. Under the new Air Traffic Safety Action Program (ATSAP), the emphasis is shifting toward the overseas-type "just culture" approach, similar to what already exists for airline incidents (where the voluntary, anonymous reporting program is called Aviation Safety Action Program--ASAP). As of April 2009, some 4,000 controllers at 35 facilities had completed the four-hour class on what ATSAP is all about, what to report, and how to report it.

NATCA regional vice president Bryan Zilonis, who helped negotiate the Memorandum of Understanding that created ATSAP, told Aviation Week that the message is getting across to controllers about the non-punitive nature of the program. Initially, to be sure, controllers were "deathly afraid" to report anything. But he said most of those who've gone through the training are "mindful and trustful of the program and see its benefits." He said it's harder for ATO managers to accept, because they have to give up some control-and he noted that initially, the airlines faced the same kind of resistance to ASAP from their pilots.

AOV vice president Robert Tarter notes that the program's first year produced about 3,000 reports-incidents AOV might not otherwise have known about. He says AOV is trying to build a just culture within the ATO.

The shift to ATSAP and the resolution of the contract issue should be catalysts for changing the historical command/control culture within the U.S. ATC system. And that is critically important for getting the whole organization constructively involved in the transition to NextGen. One possible near-term impact was reported by Scott McCartney in the Wall Street Journal (Sept. 10, 2009). He reports that at New York area airports, controllers had been defensively increasing the spacing between planes approaching the airports. Newark's landings/hour had declined from 45/hour in 2005 to 40/hour in recent years. But this past summer, with ATSAP in effect, the rate was between 48 and 50/hour. That's enough to make a real difference.

Upcoming Conferences

Future Flight Technologies: The Wings of NextGen, Sept. 16-17, Arlington, VA, Sheraton National Hotel, sponsored by FAA Flight Technologies and Procedures Division. Details at: http://cfd117.cfdynamics.com/secure/cmpfaaafs/c

54th ATCA Annual Conference & Exposition, Oct. 4-7, National Harbor, MD, Gaylord Resort & Convention Center, sponsored by the Air Traffic Control Association. Details at www.atca.org.

Reason Foundation - Policy Areas >

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Air Traffic Union Panics, Demonstrates How Badly Reform Is Needed

Hudson River Air Collision Highlights Safety Failures

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Annual Privatization Report 2009

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Airport Congestion Costs New York Billions

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FAA Nominee Talks About Air Traffic Challenges Ahead

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Gingrich Is Off Base on Fixing the Air Traffic Control System

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Paying for a Modernized Air Traffic System

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