Sunday, December 04, 2011

Fly faster, safer with new air traffic control plan

Imagine a behemoth Boeing 747 gliding for about 200 miles before landing, conserving hundreds of gallons of fuel along the way.

It's happening today at some airports as part of NextGen, a Federal Aviation Administration program to dramatically modernize the nation's air traffic control system within the next two decades. Its goals: Cut flight times and delays, make flying safer and save the airlines billions.

"We face difficult economic conditions," said Steve Lott, spokesman for Airlines for America, a trade organization that represents the major U.S. carriers. "Without significant modernization, congestion and delays will worsen as traffic increases."

At the heart of NextGen is the plan to shift from old-fashioned ground stations to satellites for navigation. Notably, this will allow planes to use GPS to fly directly to airports and make fewer turns while approaching runways. A version of the more efficient approaches already is being used at Miami International Airport.

"It's like a continual glide to the runway end," said Paul Fontaine, the FAA's technology development director. "It doesn't imply the engines are shut off."

Eventually, the low-power gliding approaches are expected to be approved for all of South Florida's major airports.

NextGen will allow planes to fly more precise routes, saving 30 to 100 gallons of fuel and shaving 10 minutes off travel time per flight, according to FAA estimates.

Among the other benefits: The program should improve safety by giving pilots a cockpit display of all the air traffic around them, the same display air traffic controllers see.

Also through the use of cockpit displays, it should minimize weather delays, which currently cost the airlines about $30 billion a year. Even in poor visibility, the displays would show a pilot the terrain as if it were a sunny day.

And NextGen should improve pilot-controller communications through the increased use of "datalink" machines, which work like e-mail and already are installed in many airliners. The devices should ease radio congestion.

By the time the program is completed in 2025, at a cost of $15 billion to $22 billion, more planes will be able to take off per hour, more planes will be able to fill the skies and more passengers will reach their destinations without delays, the FAA said.

Without NexGen, air travel is doomed to start bogging down as soon as 2015. Despite the down economy, the FAA projects the number of U.S. passengers will increase from 800 million in 2010 to more than 1 billion by 2020.

For the struggling airlines, NextGen can't be completed soon enough, said Lott, adding the airlines are counting on NextGen to improve profitability.

Pilots and air traffic controllers say NextGen already is making their jobs easier because of GPS and other new technologies. But they doubt whether an increased number of planes can move through the skies and then converge on airports without rigid air traffic control procedures to keep them separated.

"It's still going to take the same amount of air space to land on a runway, whether you're flying 747 or a Cessna," said Alan Cohn, of Plantation, a former airline captain and cargo pilot who now flies corporate jets out of Fort Lauderdale and Orlando.

Jim Marinitti, of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, said for NextGen to work, planes will need to be spaced out long before they reach busy hub airports.

"When American and Delta arrive at a destination at the same time, who's going to land first?" said Marinitti, a controller who works Miami Approach Control. "You can put down only one plane on a runway at a time."

NextGen involves numerous projects to be phased in over the next 13 years. A primary one is installing 800 small ground stations across the county. Those will allow planes with GPS to be carefully monitored on controller screens.

About half of the stations, similar to antennas, have been installed, many on cellphone towers. The job is to be completed by 2013, Fontaine, the FAA technology director, said.

Only some portions of the country are seeing the benefits of NextGen, he said, because for the system to truly work, many more aircraft will need to be GPS-equipped.

When all is said and done, the system should be efficient enough to handle a sharp increase in flights without increasing the air traffic controller workforce, he added.

"We run one of the safest air traffic systems in world," Fontaine said. "But we can always do better."

http://www.sun-sentinel.com

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