Congress Enraged by the FAA’s $40B White Elephant

By Eric Pianin,
The Fiscal Times
November 19, 2014

The Next Generation Air Transportation System – or NextGen, as it’s better known – is one of the biggest white elephants you probably never heard of.

Formally launched a decade ago by the Federal Aviation Administration, Next-Gen was designed as a complex interconnected array of new technologies that vowed to reduce flight delays and lower  fuel consumption and carbon emissions that contribute to global warming.

The estimated cost? That would be about $40 billion through 2025, which would be shared by the government and the airline industry – meaning higher taxpayer dollars and increased airline ticket fees.

The Government Accountability Office, the airline industry, lawmakers and other have complained for years that the massive project to replace the current radar-based air traffic control system was woefully behind schedule. On Tuesday, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee held a hearing on the status of NextGen. The verdict was that the proposed new system is a bust – stalled, broken and unlikely to materialize anytime soon.

Committee Chair Bill Shuster (R-PA) complained the process was broken and that the FAA was moving at a snail’s pace. Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) recalled that when he previously asked FAA Administrator Michael Huerta and his deputies about the project’s deadlines, he noted beads of sweat forming on their foreheads.

And delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, a D.C. Democrat, said that the highly ambitious effort to replace a 20th century radar-based system with a technologically efficient GPS-based system was for now far out of reach. She dismissed the 2020 date for partial implementation of NextGen as fiction, adding that the FAA is not about to see any significant changes in the existing system for the foreseeable future.

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