Out in Front: Next Is the New Now
July 1, 2009 By: Alan Cameron GPS WorldWe’re in a hurry. We know what we want, we have developed the technology to achieve it, but . . . we just can’t get there from here fast enough. Something stands in the way.
The Atlantic Interoperability Initiative to Reduce Emissions (AIRE), conducted jointly by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the European Commission, and several airlines, plans to demonstrate how GPS technology can cut flight times and reduce fuel use by thousands of pounds per longhaul flight. A green ticket, some call it.
Test aircraft will fly GPS-assisted routes that run straighter than the courses they ordinarily follow. They will climb continuously instead of in steps, and approach destinations on tailored paths, burning less fuel by running at idle for the last 100 miles.
These new navigational tools go by the name NextGen, for Next Generation Air Transportation System, the coming wave in air-traffic control. The FAA plans to implement it by 2020 for planes flying in controlled airspace in the United States.
Some say NextGen can happen today; they want what they call NowGen. They say what’s holding it up is an outdated air-traffic system — and the FAA.
Advocates including the Air Transport Association of America say NowGen could produce more than $12 billion in economic benefits through 2012. They remind us that flight delays caused by constraints in the current air-traffic system may cost more than $9 billion a year. “We have the tools today and really shouldn’t be forced to wait until 2020.”
J. Randolph Babbitt, in his first speech as FAA administrator on June 10, quoth “NextGen is just flat out not moving fast enough. I want more, and I want more faster.” However, industry critics see a long history of the FAA not showing up or simply not holding up its end of the deal in implementing new procedures.
Much of this capability has been around for some time, they maintain; manufacturers started delivering GPS-equipped passenger planes that could have supported these kinds of improvements as early as 1995.
There’s a lot more, but I’ll stash the materials on the Wide Awake blog while hurrying to the next several points.
This issue’s Letters section flames with passion over outdated specs by which the soldier’s GPS handheld was designed; further, over a flawed award process for Block IIF and prolonged Block III contract exercise that together may create gaps in the GPS constellation over the next eight years. Business Outlook warns of irrelevance-at-birth for Galileo unless the European Union issues with alacrity a signal-in-space interface control document, so that manufacturers can actually make GPS/Galileo chips.
Government moves exceedingly and sometimes maddeningly slow, except when invading the domains of other governments. To govern means to keep a steady hand on the helm. The line between steady and heavy sometimes eludes the rulers, er, that is, the representatives of the people.
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