The Federal Aviation Administration is creating a new air traffic system that officials say will be as revolutionary for civil aviation as was the advent of radar six decades ago. But the program is at a crossroads.
It’s getting harder to pry money out of Congress. The airline industry is hesitating about the cost of equipping its planes with new technology necessary to use the system. And some experts say the U.S. could lose its lead in the manufacture of high-tech aviation equipment to European competitors because the FAA is moving too slowly.
Seventy-five years ago this week, the federal government, spurred by the nascent airline industry, began tracking planes at the nation’s first air traffic control centers in Newark, N.J., Chicago and Cleveland.
The original group of 15 controllers, relying on radioed position reports from pilots, plotted the progress of flights using blackboards, maps and boat-shaped weights. Air traffic control took a technological leap forward in the 1950s with the introduction of radar. That’s still the basis of the technology used today by more than 15,000 controllers to guide 50,000 flights a day.
Under the FAA’s Next Generation Air Transportation System program, known as NextGen, ground radar stations will be replaced by satellite-based technology. Instead of flying indirect routes to stay within the range of ground stations, as planes do today, pilots will use GPS technology to fly directly to their destinations.
Planes will continually broadcast their exact positions, not only to air traffic controllers, but to other similarly equipped aircraft within hundreds of miles. For the first time, pilots will be able to see on cockpit displays where they are in relation to other planes and what the flight plans are for those aircraft. That will enable planes to safely fly closer together.
When planes approach airports, precise GPS navigation will allow them to use more efficient landing and takeoff procedures. Instead of time-consuming, fuel-burning stair-step descents, planes will be able to glide in more steeply with their engines idling.
Aircraft will be able to land and take off closer together and more frequently, even in poor weather, because pilots will know the precise location of other aircraft and obstacles on the ground. Fewer planes will be diverted.
Pilots and airline dispatchers will be able get real-time weather information. Computers will spot potential weather conflicts well in advance so planes can be rerouted. And controllers will do a lot less talking to pilots. Many instructions now transmitted by radio will instead be sent digitally to cockpits, reducing the chance of errors.
Together, the suite of new technologies and procedures being phased in will significantly increase the system’s traffic capacity, FAA officials predict. That’s critical if the number of passengers traveling annually on U.S. airlines grows from an estimated 737 million this year to more than 1 billion a year in the next decade, as the FAA forecasts.
“It really is a revolution in air transportation,” Deputy FAA Deputy Administrator Michael P. Huerta said. “The decisions we’re making in the next several years will set the foundation for the next 75 years of air traffic control.”
Paying the tab for NextGen — estimated at as much as $22 billion for the government and another $20 billion for the airline industry through 2025 — may be the FAA’s biggest hurdle.
The program has widespread support in the Obama administration and Congress, but it isn’t immune to budget cuts in the current climate of austerity. The House wants to reduce FAA’s budget authority by $1 billion a year in the next four years, while the Senate has favored higher funding.
Even longtime NextGen supporters such as Sen. Patty Murray, Washington Democrat and chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s transportation subcommittee, warn that full funding is no longer automatic.
“We need to see a realistic strategy for funding NextGen,” she told FAA Administrator J. Randolph Babbitt at a May hearing. “To date, the FAA has filled its budget request with a laundry list of programs and development activities, and a vague promise that somehow the agency will achieve its goals by 2018. But that approach is not enough this year.”
If funding is reduced, some elements of NextGen could be delayed. There is no date for completion of the entire program, which officials say is constantly evolving.
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