Air-Traffic Wish List Targets Busiest Skies: WSJ

September 22, 2013, 12:08 p.m. ET

By ANDY PASZTOR

The Wall Street Journal

Facing potentially deep budget cuts for modernizing air-traffic control, aviation-industry leaders have mobilized to protect funding for a handful of top-priority initiatives that target congestion around busy airports.

The recommendations, released by an influential U.S. Federal Aviation Administration advisory group last week, represent the industry's most detailed wish list so far of projects that should be placed on a fast track, even under the federal government's across-the-board spending reductions called sequestration.

Approved by representatives of airlines, manufacturers and labor, the recommendations are included in a report requested by FAA chief Michael Huerta. The focus is on new navigation and runway procedures that don't entail sweeping changes in current traffic management, or require major airline investments in new cockpit equipment.

Instead, the conclusions put the onus on the FAA to push ahead and even accelerate shorter-term enhancements aimed at increasing airport capacity and achieving clear-cut fuel savings before the middle of the decade.

The handful of projects at the top of the list include expanding satellite-based approach and departure procedures that already are being tested at various hub airports.

Aircraft can fly shorter, more direct routes using such procedures.

They also can increase airport capacity through more-precise and gradual descents, and by following other planes more closely to parallel or converging runways.

Other high-priority items include efforts to keep better track of planes or vehicles moving on tarmacs and revised wake-turbulence standards to reduce separation between landing aircraft.

Some efforts, however, have faltered as a result of overall agency inertia, lack of training for controllers and the FAA's slow progress in redesigning certain airspace. In April the Department of Transportation's inspector general criticized the agency for failing to develop "an integrated master schedule to help advance and prioritize" key projects.

At an industry gathering Friday, Mr. Huerta said that the agency will review the recommendations to determine its next steps. The same advisory committee also gave Mr. Huerta a report calling for stepped-up efforts to share fuel-use data among airlines in order to substantiate savings.

After ranking some three dozen planned initiatives, industry officials reached consensus on the top six. Some were included in previous recommendations. But this time, the committee explicitly ranked projects at the top that were "deemed to be high benefit and high readiness," stressing that "budget cuts should not affect these capabilities."

Missing from the top of the industry list were ambitious concepts to use digital data communications to replace radio transmissions between pilots and controllers, practices that would allow pilots to unilaterally change routes while airborne and plans to permit landings in extremely-low-visibility conditions that currently aren't possible.

The industry move comes amid escalating controversy over the direction of NextGen, the more than $40 billion proposed restructuring of the nation's air-traffic-control system.Fearing potential negative impact from sequestration, airlines and equipment manufacturers are stepping up pressure on the FAA to focus immediate attention on a handful of the most promising upgrades. The Aerospace Industries Association, which represents aerospace contractors, plans a public roundtable at the end of the month to buttress those arguments.Airlines, meanwhile, generally remain resistant to making expensive equipment purchases essential to realize the ultimate benefits of NextGen.

"In a difficult budget environment, it is important to prioritize and move forward with programs" that use existing equipment "to provide immediate benefits to the flying public and reduce fuel burn," a spokeswoman for Airlines for America, the leading trade association representing U.S. passenger and cargo airlines, said over the weekend. The association reiterated that satellite-based routes around busy airports should be a top priority.

Overall, the recommendations underscore industry's determination that before airlines agree to wholesale installation of additional equipment, the FAA should do more to ensure more-effective use of the sophisticated navigation and automated flight-control capabilities that already are available on many airliners.

Last week's report comes three months after the FAA, as part of its annual NextGen implementation update, highlighted enhanced weather detection and forecasting capabilities that didn't make the industry's top-level options. The FAA plan also noted that the agency will be able to implement fuel-saving airspace redesigns—plus associated navigation and procedural changes—at only about half of the 21 specific airports initially slated for those enhancements by 2016.

Last week's advisory report put so-called metroplex enhancements in the top tier of pending initiatives, noting the "aviation community has been actively involved and supportive" of the work. But based on the same objective criteria applied to other projects, according to the advisory committee, the airspace-redesign plans should have been relegated to a lower-priority category "deemed to be of medium benefit." 

Source:  http://online.wsj.com