Stop the Airspace redesign to protect our safety

Please review this article from The Economist on air traffic safety, flight delay, FAA funding and legislation.

The Airspace Redesign should not be implemented under these conditions.

Unfriendly skies
Nov 9th 2007
From Economist.com
http://www.economist.com/science/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=10120013

Why punctuality and safety remain up in the air

IF YOU’RE changing planes anywhere in America this coming winter, give yourself an extra hour or so between arrival and departure. So far this year, the number of flights arriving on time at the country’s 32 busiest airports is turning out to be the worst on record. One in four arrives late enough to miss a connection.

The airlines blame crowded skies, bad weather, extra security measures and government meddling. Actually, weather and security problems between them account for less than 4% of delays. If truth be told, the main culprits are airline management and staffing problems (23%), aircraft not departing (for various technical reasons) on time for their destinations or being held up en route (30%), and the antiquated air-traffic control system (34%).

Investment in infrastructure—extra runways, terminal buildings and new air-traffic control equipment—simply hasn’t kept pace with the explosive growth in air travel. At its current 4.5% annual rate, the number of air passengers travelling around the globe will more than double to 4.5 billion a year by 2025.

By then, America will need at least four new airports and major expansions at 14 existing ones. That’s a serious undertaking given that only two large airports (in Dallas and Denver) were built during the previous 40 years.

But punctuality is not the only victim of congestion in the skies and on the tarmac. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has just come in for withering criticism in Congress for trying to bury a damaging report on airline safety. Apart from hoisting astronauts into orbit, NASA oversees much of the collection and interpretation of safety data for the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA).

Or it did so until it was caught trying to bury an $11m study that quizzed 24,000 airline pilots and 5,000 general aviation pilots about near mid-air collisions, engine failures and runway incursions. NASA told the Associated Press, which had sought a copy under the Freedom of Information Act, that the data were being withheld because they could “affect the public confidence in, and the commercial welfare of, the air carriers and general aviation companies.”

In his testimony before Congress a fortnight ago, Michael Griffin, NASA’s administrator, regretted that the agency gave the impression that it put commercial interests ahead of public safety. NASA has now promised to release an edited version of the report before the end of the year.

With the twin issues of safety and congestion in the news of late, attention has focussed on the FAA’s long overdue “NextGen” upgrade to the country’s air transport system. The overhaul is expected to cost upwards of $30 billion, split between the airlines and the government.


Today’s air-traffic control system, based on a patchwork of ground-based radar control centres, is reasonably reliable but horribly inefficient. Planes are guided to their destinations along a network of zig-zag jetways, with flights handed off from one radar control centre to the next. One problem is that it can take anything up to half a minute for ground controllers to get a radar fix from a passing plane’s echo transponder.

That was fine when planes were few and far between and travelled little faster than a train. But at today’s jet speeds, an aircraft can easily be four or five miles further on from where it appears on an air-traffic controller’s screen.

Hence the need to keep planes spaced at least five miles apart horizontally when flying across the country, and no closer than three miles when preparing to land. Having to follow strict rules for safety makes it impossible for pilots to avoid congestion with short cuts or detours.

But improved safety and better use of air space need not be mutually exclusive. That’s the attraction of an entirely new form of air-traffic control known as ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast).

Instead of using radar to tell roughly where they are, planes equipped with ADS-B get their precise location and altitude from GPS satellites. They then encode this information along with data giving their flight number, speed, heading and manoeuvre, and broadcast it automatically every second to all ground stations and aircraft within a 150-mile radius.

Pilots and air-traffic controllers can then see immediately and precisely where all the surrounding traffic is at any given instant. That provides controllers with valuable extra time to resolve conflicts, while offering pilots greater control over their own flights.

Trials in Alaska show that, unlike conventional radar, ADS-B works equally well at low altitude and even on the ground. It can therefore be used to monitor aircraft on runways as well as in the air. It also works well in remote areas, over oceans or across mountainous terrain, where there is often little radar coverage.

But the really big advantage, as far as meeting the growing demand for air travel is concerned, is that ADS-B lets planes travel much closer together and take more direct routes. That would shorten the meandering 585-mile journey between Boston and Washington, DC, by as much as a third, providing comparable savings in fuel and time. Meanwhile, to hurry things up even more, landings can be spaced 45 seconds apart instead of many minutes.

A month ago, the FAA announced that the ground-based part of its NextGen air transport system would be completed by 2013. And all aircraft operating in American airspace would be required by law to carry ADS-B transmitters by no later than 2020.

Will that actually happen? The depressing thing is that similar pronouncements have been heard from the FAA before. The much-hyped MLS (Microwave Landing Systems) of the 1970s promised to unclog airports by allowing much closer approaches and landings. That got nowhere either.

Also, the FAA’s funding for NextGen is far from assured. An initial contract worth $200m or so to ITT and its partners for a handful of ADS-B ground receivers was signed in August. But thereafter hang a number of question marks.

The biggest is a recent move by Congress to raid the FAA’s trust fund—a reserve raised from excise duties on airline tickets and fuel, and earmarked for infrastructure investments like air-traffic control equipment. With an election year ahead, Congress urgently needs $50 billion to prevent 20m middle-income Americans from being clobbered by the so-called Alternative Minimum Tax. As promising and necessary as it may be, many fear the clever new air-traffic technology will be trumped, at least in America, by politics.


Heather V. Wolf
Our Airspace
contact-at-ourAirspace.org
http://ourairspace.org