Over the years, I occasionally have heard of volcanic events occurring in various parts of the world. Typically I heard only about the severe ones. You may recall the two major events from the 1980s involving Boeing 747 aircraft that encountered volcanic clouds. The clouds were of sufficient density to cause engine flame outs and a complete loss of engines. The first one occurred in 1982 when a British Airways 747 flying to Perth, Australia, encountered a volcanic cloud from an eruption in Indonesia, lost 20,000 feet and fortunately was able to restart three of four engines for an emergency landing in Indonesia. The second occurred in 1989 when a KLM 747 encountered a volcanic cloud from Mt. Redoubt south of Anchorage, lost 26,000 feet before managing to restart its engines. Although no lives were lost, the severe 1989 encounter resulted in $80M in repair costs to a $125M airplane – replacement of engines, aircraft skin, windows, and more.

Taking a closer look at aircraft damage, it’s interesting to note that in February 2000 an instrumented NASA aircraft encountered a volcanic cloud north of Iceland. It was flying from Sweden back to California at night following an ozone data collection mission. The DC-8 had been re-engined with modern, high bypass ratio, CFM-56 engines. It was packed with air quality measuring equipment, which was operating during the flight. The flight flew 200 miles north of the reported extremity of volcanic clouds emanating from Hekla, another Icelandic volcano. The sensitive air quality instrumentation detected an encounter with the volcanic cloud, which lasted for seven minutes. Since all engine functions and instruments appeared normal, the flight continued back to California without diverting. However, upon post-flight inspection, it was discovered that the engines had incurred some damage and required overhaul and refurbishment at a cost of over $3M.

While the public hears about the severest of events, few hear about the more subtle encounters. Yet, the magnitude of maintenance costs, even from brief encounters, can be substantial. How many revenue flights are needed to generate $3M in profit, the cost of overhauling engines from one incursion?

One of the problems encountered by the Europeans was the lack of useful aircraft and engine specifications for ash exposure. The current guidance from the manufacturers had been to simply avoid encounters of any kind. Simple enough to say, but seemingly too cavalier when an entire continent is shut down for days at a time. After several days of severely curtailed operations and mounting public pressure to deal with millions of stranded travelers, the manufacturers and regulators arrived at an interim ash density threshold of 2mg per cubic meter (the estimated ash concentration from the Mt. Redoubt encounter in 1989 was 2g per cubic meter, or 1000 times greater than the interim adopted level). This interim step at least allowed traffic to start moving again. No safety problems appeared to occur as a result.

However, considering the results of the NASA DC-8 encounter in 2000, a scientifically based set of standards appears to be vitally needed. Flying around volcanic clouds will likely be driven more by maintenance costs than safety, since maintenance costs will dictate ash density limits that are far lower than any safety limit. In addition, instead of a single density threshold, standards likely need to be a combination of density and duration of exposure. Finally, while most of the media attention has been on volcanic ash, it should be noted that volcanic clouds often contain significant amounts of sulfur dioxide or SO₂. Sometimes the ash and SO₂ are not in the same place. When combined with water in the atmosphere, SO₂ forms sulfuric acid, which corrodes aircraft skin and damages windows and other components, and thus results in substantial costs due to reduced aircraft service life. So, we have to pay attention to both ash and SO₂.

In response to the severe encounters in the 1980s, in 1995, ICAO established Volcanic Ash Advisory Centers (VAAC) as part of the International Airways Volcano Watch program. Nine VAACs were established under their respective host nation’s weather forecasting agency. The US has 2 VAACs (Anchorage and Washington) operating under NOAA. While VAACs have provided some degree of warning, they have a way to go. For instance, when Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, 20 aircraft were damaged due to inadvertent encounters, most over 600 miles from the eruption. There are numerous aircraft encounters in the absence of any warnings or advisories, sometimes requiring a lot of detective work to determine where the volcanic cloud might have come from.

In the case of Eyjafjallajokull, there was no confusion about the location of the eruption. While the images broadcast by the media might have suggested that there was complete understanding of the position and density of the cloud, in fact, there was great uncertainty about the current and forecast position and density. Many of the satellite sensing data required significant time to process before the resulting images could be produced. There was a lack of timely, accurate information and a lack of common situational awareness to support planning by air navigation service providers, airlines and other users, airport operators and regulators.

Many experts in European aviation, including the people who were directly involved, said that they were unprepared for this kind of event. Was this a rare event? Hardly. The diagrams below provide an idea of where active volcanoes are located, how often eruptions occur and how big they potentially could be. The USGS tracks 1500 active volcanoes worldwide.

Should we be doing more in the US and globally to be better prepared for these kinds of events? Do the financial losses incurred in the wake of Eyjafjallajokull suggest more investment to be better prepared? You be the judge.

If anything is in need of transformation in NextGen, it’s our message. It’s got to be simpler and compelling. Our return on investment has to be clear and credible. Benefits in the near term need to be committed to and delivered. RTCA TF5 was a gift in the sense that it forged community consensus to rally behind NextGen. It defined the way forward in the near term. We have to preserve that unity and begin moving out more rapidly. As a community, we together must communicate a simple, compelling message and make it easier for people on the Hill.

Some individuals point to the Reauthorization of the FAA by Congress as an indication of support for NextGen. It’s really not even half a loaf. It’s just the wrapper. The entire loaf has to come out of the appropriations. The only thing we may have going for us is the memory of how bad it got in the spring and summer of 1999 and 2000 or those more recent isolated incidents involving passengers trapped on aircraft. If people on the Hill don’t fund NextGen, those days likely will return as soon as the economy improves. Then, the folks on the street will look for someone to blame. That may be the only thing we have going for us on the Hill, if we don’t simplify the NextGen story for our legislators.

The FAA released the latest NextGen Implementation Plan (NGIP) on March 10. The NGIP is encouraging. It begins to cite real estimates of savings and benefits resulting from NextGen investments. While the examples are great, they’re a bit fragmented. The FAA with the community’s help needs to have a more comprehensive benefits story. How long will it take for the FY 2011 investment of $1.14B to pay for itself? Start there, and then elaborate with supporting evidence.

As a community, we need to work together to get this moving. We need to build solid momentum. There’s no time to waste. If we aren’t successful, where will that leave air travelers and people who depend on our nation’s air transportation system?

If you’ve been following my NextGen blog, you know how I believe benefits are going to be crucial to the continued support of NextGen and, therefore, its success. We have a situation today where the entire aviation community has rallied behind NextGen. It’s a rare kind of situation and more fragile than one might suspect. RTCA Task Force 5 expressed the industry’s view of what NextGen priorities ought to be: real, meaningful benefits in the near term. In the current federal budget/deficit climate, a program like NextGen has got to demonstrate strong, near-unanimous support to withstand budget cutbacks, which in your gut you know are coming. Public opinion probably counts the most on the Hill. Public opinion is heavily influenced by the media, which includes many more channels of information flow than just a few short years ago. Media channels quickly detect tensions and disagreements in the aviation community, and they tend to gain a disproportionate share of the attention. If NextGen funding is to be supported by the Congress and Administration over the long haul, the one essential ingredient to success will be the early and continuous delivery of benefits. In addition, the word about NextGen’s importance and progress must get out to the public in a form that can be understood easily. In the current situation, NextGen benefits are not just a huge challenge, they are an imperative.

When it comes to NAS benefits, there are many considerations that need to be taken into account. Let me start by covering a few major points about benefits and create an opening and an invitation for further dialogue on this important subject.

What’s operationally different?
Many people view benefits calculation as an economic endeavor. While benefits are usually expressed in monetary terms at the end of the analysis, the question at the core of benefits analysis is: what’s operationally different? If we make an investment to improve the system, what will be operationally different after we implement the change? Will we be able to move more aircraft per hour? Will we reduce fuel consumption and carbon emissions? How much time will be saved? How much more reliable will the schedule be? Will we be able to increase the utilization of expensive equipment and workers? How do these aspects of the operation look before and after we make the change? It’s only after we define what’s operationally different that we can translate the value of those differences into economic terms. The economic translation is almost trivial. Figuring out what is operationally different is the hard part.

Defining the sequence of improvements: staking claim to benefits
When you have a big, visible problem, there are naturally going to be several sometimes competing ideas to address the same problem. Whenever this happens, you run into the risk of each idea laying claim to fixing the problem. When several potential solutions do that for the same problem, each effectively is laying claim to the same set of benefits. This is a no-no in benefits analysis; some refer to this as double-counting. Conceptually, the economists and “bugeteers” want us to invest first in the solution that produces the biggest bang for the buck. Allow that investment to lay claim to the improvements and benefits associated with mitigating the problem. Once this is done, then consider how much more room there is for further improvement and allow other solutions to compete for the left-over benefits. If any of the solutions is capable of producing more benefits than it costs to implement, then it can be considered for implementation. But, in most cases the bar is set pretty high, since most of the benefits should have already been claimed by the preceding improvement. In practice, all of this doesn’t work as neatly as one might hope. It’s usually a food fight. The biggest bang for the buck alternative might take a lot longer to implement or might require more cash than people are able to commit. Sometimes the beneficiaries of the improvements are not the ones who have to make the investment, so there’s not enough motivation to spend the money. Each alternative has an associated level of risk that may vary widely from competing alternatives. Alternatives don’t always pursue the exact same set of benefits, so an apples-to-apples comparison is sometimes difficult. Then, there are hidden agendas at work as well, and some individuals are not immune to manufacturing misinformation to advance their agenda.

Considering baskets of investments and benefits
When you work with improving a nation’s air transportation system, many of the required investments are huge. There is a tendency to want to subject each and every incremental investment to economic analysis and justification. The problem is that some of the required investments are enablers of downstream improvements. This is often the case with infrastructure investments. If you just look at the infrastructure investment by itself, it may be difficult to economically justify. It’s a bit analogous to trying to do a cost-benefit analysis on a transmission for a car. In this case, it’s clearer that doing a cost-benefit analysis on a transmission doesn’t make much sense. It makes more sense to do it on the entire car, which vitally depends on the transmission and if employed properly is capable of delivering substantial benefits. Doing a cost-benefit analysis on data link communications is analogous to doing a cost-benefit analysis on a transmission.

Everything is connected — well, almost everything
In the past, when various projects were launched to improve the arrival and approach phase of flight, not much attention was paid to what was happening to departures, or surface operations. In fact, there were times in the past when there were individual projects addressing arrivals, departures and surface operations, each individually striving to improve its own operation without regard for the others. The optimization algorithms for arrivals, departures and surface operations were fighting with each other. This is an obvious case where the three processes should be worked on simultaneously and in a coordinated way to produce an optimization of the whole, across all three processes. But, you shouldn’t stop there. There are overhead streams of traffic, inbound flights that are rerouted and delayed due to weather or congested sectors en route, and flights that are flying to destinations that are projected to be over-saturated when the flights are scheduled to arrive, as well as a myriad of similar interdependencies. The point is, you can focus on a specific problem, but unless you consider what is going on in the bigger picture, a local improvement might not produce the envisioned benefits as a result of some other connected problem in the system. And, just because you fix an isolated problem, there’s no guarantee that the fix will work when it has to function as part of a larger system. There is a body of work known as Theory of Constraints, which directs focus on the ultimate objective of a system (or organization) and bottlenecks that prevent the system from attaining its objectives. Focus is placed on removing the most obvious bottleneck, recognizing that as soon as one bottleneck is eliminated, another one is likely to emerge elsewhere in the system. Each constraint is relieved until the system begins to function as intended. Often, it’s difficult to predict where the next constraint will emerge, since systems are more complex than we make them out to be. It’s another way of looking at the system we operate in. Our work in Air Traffic Flow Management over the years has taught us a lot about the connectedness of our system. It’s caused us to develop an integrated, end-to-end suite of tools, which we call Metron Harmony. Check it out.

Nothing is static, especially stakeholder behaviors
In operational and benefit analyses, as in most studies, we make assumptions. Many studies have a section devoted to assumptions. Often assumptions are made to make the problem tractable. Assumptions can simplify the problem or the analysis, so that it’s possible to complete the analysis. For this reason, sometimes we refer to these as “simplifying assumptions.”  As an example, studies will say, let’s assume that growth will continue to occur at 3 percent per year as it has for each of the last 5 years on average, or let’s assume that the price of fuel remains the same in terms of 1995 constant dollars. If you don’t make these kinds of assumptions, it’s a lot harder to complete the analyses. The problem is that these often are bad assumptions, bad in the sense that they are unlikely to hold. So, the results of the analysis are not likely to be reliable. A simple case from my own experience occurred while I was with the FAA. Around 1997, the agency was faced with mounting delays at DFW. The airlines were pleading with the FAA to develop and deploy new technologies to increase the capacity and thereby relieve delays. Without capacity improvements, delays would mushroom and gridlock was a real possibility. We did the analysis and made some simplifying assumptions. We showed that if we invested in the new technology, throughput capacity would be increased significantly and delays would be substantially reduced for years to come. The benefits significantly exceeded the cost. So, the FAA made the investment. The technology was developed and installed. When it finally went into operational use, as expected, throughput capacity was increased. Success! Then, the unanticipated happened. American added a lot of new flights to the schedule. So, delays didn’t decrease as predicted. We later learned that American was concerned that if they didn’t fill that capacity, a competitor would. They felt it was vital to protect their dominant position at DFW, so they were compelled to add the flights. This is a simple example. There are many and far more subtle behavior changes that occur whenever improvements are introduced. Fortunately, today we have tools that can help us model and predict primary, secondary and tertiary responses to changes in complex systems. To each action, there are reactions and subsequent reactions rippling through the system until a new equilibrium is established.

POET (T is last)
When I was still a young person at the FAA, I can’t recall exactly where or from whom, I learned about POET – political, operational, economic, and technical. That’s the order of importance of considerations that need to be accounted for when bringing about change. Political factors cover a lot of things. We’ve already talked about the need for continued support from the Congress and the Administration, particularly in a difficult fiscal climate. Public opinion is a driver, along with a myriad of political considerations. But, political considerations also include stakeholders, their interests and their cultures. These stakeholders include the airlines, general aviation, airports, labor unions, travellers, manufacturers and service providers, government organizations, and others. Many of the changes envisioned under NextGen will entail changes to the concept of operations. People in various parts of the systems will be asked to take on new or modified tasks, and to perhaps stop doing things that had been done for many years. More functions will be automated, in many cases to keep the human workload at an acceptable level. When people, computers, procedures and new concepts are integrated, the operation must effectively achieve what was envisioned and achieve it safely. In the realm of economics, the FAA requires a positive return on investments, so the benefits must exceed the cost of changes. But, in those instances where complementary investments must be made by the users or other stakeholders, it can be dicey, irrespective of what the benefit-cost study says. The required investment by each user must stand up to benefit-cost scrutiny from the perspective of that user, assuming that their cash flow or debt load even allow them to consider the investment. Lastly, the technical work must be done – the technology must work. In many cases, this is the easiest part of the problem. That’s the reason T is last.

FAA’s response to RTCA TF5
In late January 2010, the FAA issued its response to the RTCA Task Force 5 recommendations of September 2009. The FAA’s response is a thorough, point-by-point enumeration of commitments it’s making to address the RTCA recommendations. The responses thoughtfully address the recommendations and show some creativity by introducing some fresh approaches to old problems. As an example, the FAA’s response includes a discussion about the change in handling controller operational errors (OE). You have to go back about five years to recall that OEs seemed to be growing at a disconcerting rate (this was probably more visible internally than externally to the FAA). As a result, the FAA “declared war” on OEs. They were going to be hunted down and exterminated. While obvious in hindsight, at the time no one seemed to care about the potential impact of the “war on OEs” on efficiency. If you’re a controller and there’s no reward for increasing throughput, but a harsh penalty for any infraction of the separation standard, including the most common but least worrisome 2.9 nm in-trail separation, what are you going to do? You spread out the traffic, so you never have an OE. But, what does that do to traffic? It drops the acceptance rate and reduces capacity during busy periods. This FAA response takes credit for changes it instituted last summer. The FAA now reports OEs by removing specific employee identification and has implemented a systematic, non-punitive method of identifying, evaluating and correcting potential safety hazards. The process includes the controller union as an integral part of the process. There are technologies that are being introduced as well to simplify the task of merging, spacing and separating aircraft. But, the non-technical change in handling OEs is likely to have the most far-reaching effects. It’s an example of the kind of change that can make a huge difference in the way the system functions. Change can happen quickly and inexpensively, yet produce tremendously beneficial results.

This blog is already several times longer than a respectable blog entry, so let’s end it here for now. We’ll pick it up again and discuss where in NextGen we might expect to see verifiable, measureable benefits. Without question, there are many opportunities to generate clear, substantial benefits in the near term. But, as you can see, benefits can be elusive, since there are numerous ways of falling off the tightrope if you don’t know the ropes.

On another planet of sorts, the Copenhagen climate talks have now come to a close. Despite a huge build-up of expectations concerning emission limits, financial assistance, and a formalized process going forward, it appears that very little of substance was agreed to. On one level, developed nations are asking developing nations to cut back on the growth of their carbon emissions. It’s easy for developed nations to say this, since they’ve already gotten theirs. Economic development and growth is energy-intensive by its very nature. Developing countries need to produce energy and lots of it at the lowest possible cost, if they are to support rapid growth. This is exactly what developed countries did in the past to economically get to where they are today.

The biggest issue at Copenhagen was about developed countries providing financial assistance to developing countries. The Europeans had been pushing for $100B per year by the year 2020, while the US proposed $10B per year by 2012. If you plot a curve to get to either one these points, I suspect you’ll see that the curves are not all that different. Yet, the debates have made it seem like they were worlds apart. Toward the end of the conference, President Obama said that the US would support the European proposal. In the end, the final agreement called for developed countries to provide assistance in the amount of $30B by 2012 ($10B/year from 2010 thru 2012) and $100B/year by 2020. But, the agreement is not legally binding. The binding language will be deferred to a conference in Mexico a year from now – leaving one less year to get to the 2012 total and 2020 yearly target. The President of the United States can only do so much to commit the US to funding assistance. Ultimately the Congress has to appropriate the funds. It will be interesting to see what does in fact become legally binding and what our share of the bill will be among the developed nations. Up until now, the timing for the Copenhagen discussions has been poor at best. The US and Europe are in a recession. The US seems to have hit bottom, but unemployment continues to be a major, continuing problem. Europe isn’t much better off, especially with ongoing reports of financial issues in Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain. We can only hope that the economies of all developed nations improves soon, so climate change assistance, as well as a myriad of other expenses, can be more properly addressed.

One of the side debates was about the definition of “developing country.” Secretary of State Clinton has said they include only the poorest and neediest. This plays well at home, since it strongly suggests we are not funding China – their GDP growth rate is 8.9%, for goodness sakes! But, if we say we are not funding China, should we stop asking them to back off on their emissions? China’s the most obvious case, but there are a number of developing nations that are doing pretty well at the moment, failing the “poorest and neediest” criterion.

While the climate talks largely have fizzled, the problem isn’t going away. If anything, the disappointment following the Copenhagen conference could heighten the public outcry for truly meaningful action (not to be confused with a political declaration of meaningful results). Aviation must remain vigilant and committed to the reduction of carbon emissions. There is much that can be done to make our air transportation system more fuel and carbon-efficient. That’s exactly what Metron Aviation is focused on with our research and suite of air traffic management products.

About two years ago, I visited Japan for the very first time. My ancestors came from Japan, so most people were surprised to hear that I had never been there before. I had been invited to give a talk at a conference sponsored by Japan Railway – on climate change. During my trip, I had the opportunity to travel from Kyoto to Tokyo by Shinkansen, more commonly known as the bullet train. I asked the concierge at my hotel in Kyoto to make reservations to get me to Tokyo by the appointed time. When I went to the train station to catch the train, I was amazed to find that there was a bullet train to Tokyo every 3-9 minutes, most of them running every 3-6 minutes! I had been imagining there was one every hour or two. After all of this time, I still think it’s amazing.

Many people from the US have ridden the Shinkansen, the TGV or DB-ICE in Europe, or high speed trains elsewhere in the world, and they come away asking why can’t we have this at home? While in Japan, I had the opportunity to talk to the Chairman of Japan Railway and some of his executives. I learned that they are privately financing the construction of a maglev line from Tokyo-Nagoya-Kyoto-Osaka, boring long distances through mountains in the process. They told me that over ten years ago they had been asked to help the US Department of Transportation do a feasibility study for high speed rail in the Northeast Corridor (Washington-Philadelphia-New York-Boston). They said that the case for high speed rail clearly was compelling and economically feasible. When I’ve had discussions with transportation experts here, invariably they throw up their hands and point to the right-of-way barriers that prevent implementing high speed rail.

Think about what is being said. Think about where we will be in 2050, if we don’t change course. In the broader scheme of things, as a society we must find ways of doing things in the most efficient way possible. Short haul transportation between major cities in the Northeast Corridor to a large extent should be done via high speed rail. It would alleviate unnecessary airspace congestion, reduce delays, save fuel and reduce carbon emissions. As we consider NextGen in the broader context, we must begin thinking intermodal — not just about air transportation, but all modes of transportation. NextGen is a strategic component of the larger transportation system. Air traffic flow management is but a component of multi-modal passenger flow management. Air must fit in with all forms of transportation, and transportation must fit in with the economy and the environment. All of the pieces will need to fit together to get us where we need to be by 2025 or 2050 for future generations.

As we reflect on the future, especially at this time of the year, let’s recommit ourselves to building a better place for future generations. We must find new ways of tackling these huge, old problems. Certainly we want to avoid having our grandchildren scream at us, asking “What in the heck were you thinking?”

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.

The FAA has committed to implementing the TF5 recommendations. How it exactly does this remains to be seen. FAA’s COO, Hank Krakowski, in response to a question said that the FAA’s detailed response would be available by December. But, without doubt, FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt and Krakowski fully committed the agency to implement the recommendations.

Hank Krakowski made an interesting, new revelation during his closing remarks. He talked about what appears to be a major reorganization of the FAA’s Air Traffic Organization. He said it’s been two years in the works, which means he’s been working on it since he arrived. He said he is going to restructure to drive the ATO together to be one operations organization, not multiple organizations consisting of terminal, en route, sysops and tech ops. He wants to get away from a structure focused on function and move to one that is organized around mission. This change appears to be fundamentally consistent with one of the TF5 cross-cutting recommendations that address integration of ATM services. We’ve been seeing the need to better integrate the system from gate to gate for several years and have been working toward that end with several key projects. So, despite not knowing the details of how things will be restructured, the change resonates well. The reality is that this is a major restructuring. We are talking about organizations that have existed for perhaps fifty years. We are talking about something in excess of 25,000 people within the FAA, not to mention those outside the FAA that are linked to it. This will be huge. This will be difficult. It will be disruptive (there’s that word again). It’s interesting that Krakowski chose this event to make public this change. Can’t help but think that this disruption is intended to facilitate the changes required by NextGen.

When you work on the inside of RTCA TF5 as we have, you tend to get swept away with the idea that things are finally going to be different and that starting today things are finally going to begin moving forward at a faster rate. After all, we’re all preaching to the choir. At the conference, the luncheon speaker was Gael Sullivan. He’s the senior Democratic Staffer on the Senate authorizing committee, the Commerce, Science and Technology Committee. Sullivan has been on the Hill for 18 years. He previously worked on the House side on key authorizing committees, the House Transportation Committee and Aviation Subcommittee. He knows our part of government and he knows our industry inside and out. It was the first reality check of the day for me. I said to myself, oh yeah, we’re in Washington. Sullivan talked about all of the budgetary pressures facing the country: health care, economic recovery, the deficit, financial regulation, and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. NextGen has to compete with these needs for funding. Later in the day, Steve Brown, SVP for Operations at NBAA and former FAA insider, talked about the need for greater public attention on the problems NextGen is trying to fix. Brown pointed out that aviation efficiency problems are rarely on the front page of newspapers. If the public is not focused on it, you can bet members on the Hill aren’t either. We as an industry need to get organized to raise the awareness of the public and our representatives on the Hill. But, the next question is who will step up to get us organized? Who in our industry can serve in that role as a trusted agent of all of the stakeholders? Clearly there are some capable organizations that have too many axes to grind for others to accept. I think of organizations like the Aerospace Industries Association as one of those that is respected and trusted by most and has the ear of Congress. Perhaps there are others.

One of the most compelling presentations at the conference was by Captain Ken Speir of Delta. He’s Delta’s Chief Pilot in Atlanta. Speir still flies regular rotations and decided to chronicle his latest rotation that he flew a couple of days earlier. This is no special flight schedule rotation according to Speir. It was just a very normal one almost like every other. Yet, as he described his itinerary in great detail – taxi out delays, detours here and detours there – the mounting problems were horrendous. Solutions to several of the problems seemed to be within today’s grasp. The need for change was indeed compelling. The public needs to hear more about these kinds of problems that affect nearly every flight. The cost of these problems needs to be translated into a form that the public can relate to. I think it was Steve Brown who said that we need to relate TF5 recommendations to these flight rotation problems to see how much improvement we might expect.

The RTCA TF5 recommendations are compelling. But, so is dependable funding from Congress. What Congress cares most about is public opinion. And, right now, we have a need, but we have no plan to address public opinion. As an industry, we need to get going on this front too if we’re going to make NextGen a reality.

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.

On January 16, 2009, Hank Krakowski, the Chief Operating Officer of the FAA Air Traffic Organization (ATO), and Peggy Gilligan, FAA Associate Administrator for Aviation Safety (AVS), sent a letter to RTCA requesting that a government industry task force be established to forge community-wide consensus on the recommended NextGen operational improvements to be implemented during the transition between now and 2018. It’s no secret that there had been long-standing discontent about the need to show more visible progress on the NextGen front. In fairness, progress had been made in the definition of a future operational concept, operational improvements and required work and schedules to deliver improvements, but not enough progress in terms of movement toward delivering visible, “no-kidding” improvements and benefits — too much paper and not enough action. Yet, the type of progress made on NextGen, coupled with the steadily worsening condition of the system, produced sufficient support to finally gain budgetary increases from the Hill. Federal stimulus thinking didn’t hurt either, since NextGen looks a lot like infrastructure and infrastructure renewal generally produces a lot of jobs. But, political support for almost anything is a fragile thing. So, to preserve the support for NextGen funding, it will be vital to get the entire aviation community behind NextGen. It will be important to reduce the potential for detractors and distractions. Using RTCA and its proven and accepted method to forge aviation community consensus seemed to be a natural step to take to bridge the unhappiness about slow progress.

As well as RTCA Task Forces have worked, they often don’t turn out exactly the way things are envisioned at the outset. Take RTCA Task Force 3 for instance. It started out as a white, silk scarf concept. Bill Cotton of United Airlines had a vision of a future system where pilots could fly more freely without air traffic control directing them every step of the way. Bert Rutan had similar ideas, as did Glenn Gilbert well before Rutan. But, by the time RTCA brought the community together and people really engaged and tried to determine what was feasible and what really could be done in any reasonable time, the consensus was to recommend some 70 odd actions to implement improvements to the system that bore little resemblance to Bill Cotton’s original free flight idea. RTCA Task Force 5 experienced some of the same kind of unpredictability. In the beginning, what was envisioned was a robust, data-driven approach. It was to have been a fully transparent and quantitative process that would allow anyone to see and understand the basis for each final conclusion and recommendation. Well into the quantitative process, it became apparent that there was very little in the way of quantitative data and analysis to guide the conclusions. So, the process was re-engineered on the fly to gather the users of the system to try to distill clear consensus on what the near term emphases should be for NextGen. The users relied to some extent on the available analyses and data, as well as recorded subjective opinions, that had been compiled against each candidate operational capability. But, in the end, the consensus of the user community represented a distillation of the obvious – obvious near term improvements within the NextGen framework that will produce early and significant operational and economic benefits. It was a masterful recovery on the part of RTCA and the Task Force 5 leaders.

On balance, RTCA Task Force 5 isn’t too far off-course from previous NextGen plans. There is a lot of consistency. But, the recommendations go a long way toward focusing NextGen implementers on a smaller set of priorities that are most greatly valued by the users of the system. Some people will view the RTCA Task Force 5 recommendations as an unwelcomed disruption to their current plans. Instead, they should think about embracing the recommendations and treat them as a gift. Placing priority on these recommendations will serve to keep the entire aviation community together, speaking positively with one voice, to preserve and perhaps build even greater support for funding improvements envisioned under NextGen.