Metron Aviation. The Science of Harmonizing Air Traffic

Many of us in aviation watched in awe as the Eyjafjallajokull volcano on Iceland began erupting in earnest on April 14 and began disrupting air traffic all over Europe. According to Oxford Economics, that first week of disruption caused an estimated impact of $4.7B, not just limited to Europe, but extending to North America, Asia and other parts of the world. We realized the potential contributions that Air Traffic Flow Management (ATFM) could make and began prototyping specialized tools for use in this situation. But, more on that some other time. Read the rest of this entry »

The time has come for “all hands on deck.” FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt and Air Traffic Organization chief Hank Krakowski testified on March 18 before the House Appropriations Subcommittee. They were defending the agency’s FY 2011 budget request. They were asking for $1.14B for NextGen in FY 2011. That’s 32 percent more than received in FY 2010. That’s in a climate of record deficits due to two wars, financial bail-outs, cash for clunkers, and heath care, all piled on top of the pre-existing entitlements. While Randy Babbitt and Hank Krakowski seemed to say the right things, they weren’t able to calm the waters completely. Subcommittee Chair John Oliver, according to NextGov, seemed to have doubts. He said “It’s hard to see what the cumulative result of [NextGen] is yet because it is so complex and comprehensive….”  No question, it is big and complex. Even when you work on it from the inside, it’s hard to get your arms around it. Think about how difficult it must be for the folks on the Hill, much less the folks on the street, who by the way vote for the folks on the Hill. As a result, the folks on the Hill often pay more attention to the folks on the street than the folks who testify. It’s the way our system was designed. Read the rest of this entry »

In response to a recent question about NextGen benefits, I decided to devote this blog entry to that topic. The question came from Bud Bensel, who said he had developed the initial SOIA procedures and PRM operations. I presume this must have been for SFO or STL. Bensel felt that NextGen benefits were elusive. He wanted to know where I felt “definitive, quantifiable and verifiable improvements in capacity and flight operational efficiencies” would be realized in NextGen. Read the rest of this entry »

As the year winds down and I begin taking stock, a couple of things come to mind. Here we are standing on the verge of NextGen moving to the next level. We’ve begun fast convergence as a community this year, rallying behind NextGen. I have a button from the National Alliance to Advance NextGen – NextGen Now! It had its start in the airports community. RTCA Task Force 5 produced its recommendations for NextGen mid-term priorities. It was driven by the NAS user community. The FAA has said it will embrace these recommendations and is in the process of awarding a family of major NextGen contracts to undertake the largest investment in FAA history. The aviation industry is sending letters of NextGen support to the Congress that carry signatures of the CEOs of many airlines and aviation industry leaders. Yes, there are competing interests and potential obstacles, but the planets seem to have aligned to support NextGen. Read the rest of this entry »

NextGen Mid-Term Implementation Task Force, better known as RTCA Task Force 5, completed its work and delivered its final report to the FAA on September 9. On September 15, RTCA put on an all-day conference at a local hotel in Washington, DC to discuss the TF5 recommendations.

In a nutshell, the TF5 recommendations identify five specific problem areas in the system and two cross-cutting areas that are in greatest need of attention. The five specific areas are: surface, runway access, metroplexes, cruise efficiency and access to the NAS. The two cross-cutting areas are data communications and integration of ATM services. If you want information on the TF5 recommendations, the best place to go is the RTCA website (www.rtca.org). I found it amusing that several people I talked to at the meeting complained about how, after listening to the speakers all day long, still had no inkling of what was in the report. If they came to the conference hoping to avoid reading the report, they left disappointed. Had they read the report, the discussions at the conference pretty clearly marked the path forward. Read the rest of this entry »

As RTCA Task Force 5 comes to a conclusion, I think it’s interesting to try to understand what it represents in the broader scheme of things.

Everything in nature seems to seek equilibrium. Hot flows to cold, water seeks a common level, and industries and institutions tend to do the same thing. You achieve equilibrium and then things stop. NextGen, and NGATS before it, had been several years in the making, since 2003 to be exact. The creation of the Joint Planning Development Office to spearhead the planning and design of the next generation air transportation system in itself was a major disruption to an otherwise “business-as-usual” evolution of the nation’s Air Traffic Control system. It was to have been transformational to meet the tripling of traffic over the next 50 years. The tendency to revert to static equilibrium is so great that disruptions are needed on a regular basis to get things moving again. In fact, if we think about it, the Operational Evolution Plan, later renamed as the Operational Evolution Partnership, represented an internal FAA disruptor to sharpen the focus and push through a handful of key improvements needed to deliver earlier benefits to the users of the system. Back in the mid1990s, there was Free Flight and RTCA Task Force 3, another source of major disruption that finally led to the FAA creation of the Free Flight Office and the wider implementation of TMA, URET and other improvements. Read the rest of this entry »