SKYAID
New 
Mission
Overview   
Details    
Medical   
Watch   
Heart attack  
Stroke    
World health  
Emergency
Cost effective
Media 
- Site Map 

SKYCAR   
Details   
Overview  
VTOL   
Airline   
Military   
Transportation
Images 
- Site Map

Search

Translate 
  8 languages
 

Two Pacific Nations Try to Coax FAA Into Upgrading to Paperless Travel

By SCOTT MCCARTNEY
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Dec 29, 2000

Skyaid comment: Skycar Air Traffic Management can be developed at low cost. New Zealand ATC upgrade for trans-ocean cost only $4.5 million, whereas the similar  US-FAA  project skyrocketed over the initial $140 million estimate.

BRISBANE, Australia -- His eyes glued to a computer monitor, Bob Buchbach guides jetliners across the Pacific by pointing and clicking his mouse. With the press of a button, the Australian air-traffic controller checks for potential flight-plan conflicts between planes hundreds of miles apart. To touch base with pilots, he sends them e-mail via satellite link.

The underlying technology is hardly revolutionary -- it's been commercially available for years. Mr. Buchbach's setup wouldn't impress a video-game enthusiast or a wireless road warrior. But it dazzles U.S. air-safety regulators. The Federal Aviation Administration's technology for routing jumbo jets across open ocean -- beyond the reach of radar -- hasn't changed much since the 1970s.

U.S. air-traffic controllers in Oakland, Calif., who each monitor about 15 trans-Pacific flights at a time, still use strips of paper to track planes across their assigned expanse of ocean. They plot each flight's progress on a sheet of Plexiglass as the pilot radios in from checkpoints along the way. To predict an aircraft's future position, they use circular slide rules, just as their predecessors did decades ago, in the days of the Pan Am Clippers.

{Most people stopped using a circular slide rule for more accurate calculations than a conventional slide rule in the mid 60's]

Pulling the Plug

The FAA was supposed to have updated the woefully inefficient system long ago. But the agency pulled the plug on its overhaul in the late 1990s after three years of cost overruns and repeated technical failures. Meanwhile, Australia and New Zealand forged ahead, developing sophisticated oceanic flight-control systems that have improved safety while reducing flying times, jet-fuel consumption and route congestion over the Pacific.

Now, chastened by failure and scrambling to catch up, the FAA has altered its course, opting to buy into a proven success. Earlier this year, the agency picked two finalists to compete for the job of modernizing its Pacific coverage. One, led by closely held Arinc Inc., an Annapolis, Md., satellite-communications company, is championing Australia's technology. The other, led by Lockheed Martin Corp., is backing New Zealand's.

Cause for Complaint

That the FAA is looking outside the U.S. for help is a testament to how badly the agency has botched its own systemwide efforts to keep pace with the growing demand for air travel, which is expected to double over the next decade. The all-too-familiar result: gridlock in the skies. Over the past two summers, the number of delayed flights at U.S. airports has soared 53%, and the FAA has been powerless to turn the tide. Not only do the mounting delays anger travelers, they irk domestic and foreign airlines alike.

"It's the U.S. that has dragged the chain," says Capt. Murray Warfield, head of regulatory affairs for Australia's Qantas Airways. Qantas and other trans-Pacific carriers say the FAA's obsolete overocean tracking tools cost them time and money and leave too much room for error.

Several Pacific island nations share those concerns, according to Capt. Warfield and others who attended an international conference on oceanic airspace last year. Delegates from those nations, whom the conference attendees declined to identify, suggested to international aviation authorities that the U.S. should give up control of some of its Pacific airspace, at least until the FAA upgrades its system.

Technical Failures

For the FAA, modernization has been a long, slow struggle across the board. In 1981 the agency launched what was to have been a 10-year, $12 billion program aimed at improving its management of domestic air traffic. But the program tripled in cost, and some of its biggest projects were plagued by technical setbacks. As a result, the FAA had to postpone, at least until 2002, the deployment of a key satellite-based navigation system that was supposed to be in place by 1998.

The FAA's parallel program to improve air-traffic control over the Pacific Ocean -- where the U.S. administers a total of 18.7 million square miles of airspace -- was even less successful.

In 1995, the FAA awarded a $140 million contract to Hughes Aircraft Co., since acquired by Raytheon Co., for a new oceanic tracking system. The cost of the first phase of the program, budgeted at $4.5 million, skyrocketed. One problem: The FAA kept altering its goals and specifications. For example, Raytheon says, the agency decided a year into the program that predicting conflicts between flights should be the top priority, even though conflict-prediction technology wasn't included in the original contract.

The frequent add-ons complicated the development process, contributing to technical failures that kept the complex system from getting off the ground, except for a new data link between pilots and controllers. In 1998, the FAA canceled the rest of the contract after investing a total of $58 million in the effort. The program's failure infuriated the airlines, which had spent more than $1 million per plane to upgrade their cockpits to handle the new satellite-based technology.

The FAA concedes it has mismanaged many of its past modernization efforts. And it says it has since adopted a more targeted approach to procuring technology, tackling smaller projects one at a time to increase its chances of success.

How did Australia and New Zealand manage to succeed where the U.S. fell short? The answer lies in the small size and relative autonomy of air-safety regulators Airservices Australia and Airways New Zealand, which both operate as self-supporting businesses, earning their income from fees charged to airlines. Their controllers and software developers were intimately involved in the design process, handling much of the work themselves. And they and their managers kept a sharp eye on the bottom line, insisting on simple, no-frills solutions.

The tale begins 10 years ago, when a group of airlines, including Qantas, UAL Corp.'s United Airlines and Air New Zealand, approached international aviation officials with a proposal to install new satellite-based technology developed by Boeing Co. on all passenger aircraft plying the Pacific. The new technology would allow for instant communications with the ground. It would report each plane's position automatically. An onboard computer would predict the aircraft's future position as it continued on its route as well as its arrival times at key navigational fixes.

"The airlines said there's a better way to do navigation, but if the airplanes updated, the ground had to update, too," says Andrew Griffith, technology group manager for Airways New Zealand.

Selling Points

The plan promised to increase passenger safety by taking much of the guesswork out of air-traffic control. It would allow controllers to pinpoint an aircraft's location, even between radio checkpoints. That, in turn, would give a pilot more flexibility to deviate from those checkpoints if crowded skies, changing winds or other atmospheric conditions made the original flight path less than ideal.

Such flexibility, the airlines said, could shave 30 minutes off a 14-hour trans-Pacific flight, reducing fuel costs. If the time could be cut enough, routes such as Los Angeles to Melbourne, considered too long for even long-haul jets, might become practical.

Recognizing the potential benefits, Airways New Zealand and its peers in other Pacific nations, including the U.S. and Australia, agreed to make the necessary improvements in their flight-control operations.

Like the U.S., Australia was eager to modernize its entire air-traffic control system, including its oceanic coverage. And it had an added incentive: Authorities didn't want delays at Sydney, Australia's busiest airport, to mar the 2000 Summer Olympics: "We needed to get with it," says Ian Carmody, manager of commercial services for Airservices Australia.

Bypassing Hughes, the company that had won the contract to modernize the FAA's oceanic tracking system, Airservices decided to build a new system based on existing technology, which it bought from Thomson CSF of France. Several former FAA controllers served as part of Airservices' lean development team, including some fired by President Reagan during a 1981 controllers strike.

Avoiding Pitfalls

While it wanted a new control system that was suited to its specific needs, Airservices tried to avoid customization where possible, in favor of off-the-shelf technology. The strategy, aimed at keeping costs low and avoiding complications, was inspired partly by the FAA's experience: By the mid-1990s, as Australia was replacing the 1950s-era radar in its domestic air-traffic control stations, it was becoming obvious that the FAA was struggling in its effort to develop its own modern technologies from scratch.

"The FAA had fallen into all the traps, and we wanted to stay out of them," says Bob Brown, an FAA alumnus and one of only 14 members of the Australian project's development team. "It was clear, both here and overseas, that trying to invent the wheel was an approach that was failing."

Some Australian controllers pressed for changes in the way a prototype of the new system displayed flight data, such as speed and altitude. They wanted it to mimic the pecularities of other paper-based data displays that Australian controllers already used. Airservices said no, telling controllers they would have to adapt to the new format. Meanwhile, the agency enjoined its software developers from using any technology, such as artificial intelligence, that Airservices considered too fancy.

The result: Australia managed to build its new oceanic air-traffic control system in eight years and on budget, at a cost of 400 million Australian dollars (roughly US$225 million at current exchange rates). The new system, which is 60% Australian-made, went into nationwide service in February. It processes data transmitted automatically via satellite from each aircraft's cockpit, as well as position reports from the pilot, and calculates where the plane is, based on its speed, flight plan and wind conditions. Then, on the controller's computer screen, it translates the data into a radarlike image of the aircraft and its location.

'No Problem'

"On the old system, you would keep a mental picture of where they were. You get 20 aircraft, and you start to lose the picture," says Mr. Buchbach, the Australian controller. "Here, we handle 25 aircraft at a time with no problem." His only complaint: So much of his task is automated now that he finds it harder to keep his mind from wandering.

The new system has improved safety and allowed Airservices to reduce staff, while cutting the fees it charges airlines, the source of the agency's income. And when the Olympics produced a 25% increase in air traffic to and from Sydney, delays were minimal. "Two years ago, we wouldn't have been able to cope with it," says Ken McLean, Airservices' manager of Sydney operations.

With controllers and pilots now using e-mail to communicate and with computers helping the ground keep a lookout for flight-plan conflicts, a pilot can quickly get an answer when he asks an Australian controller for permission to change altitude or heading in order to avoid bad weather or turbulence. That compares with the 15 minutes of slide-rule calculations and static-filled high-frequency radio calls it would have taken to clear the request using the old technology. And it gives passengers a better chance of having a smooth ride.

Airways New Zealand hired Canadian aviation-technology company CAE Inc. to build its new system, with the agency also handling much of the work itself. It set up its own software-development team and sent software engineers to CAE's plant in Toronto for as long as two years to work on the project, which involved 900 million lines of software instructions.

"We were forced to be efficient and lean," says Howard Anderson, the agency's en-route air-traffic services manager.

Neil McCracken, who had previously taught software-design at University of Canterbury in Christchurch, on New Zealand's South Island, says he jumped at the chance to get involved in the project. "It comes down to culture. We're a small, fairly self-reliant country. We've got to make things work," he says.

While the Australian system is flexible and solid, the New Zealand system is more sophisticated. Its software automatically checks for conflicts between airplanes. More farsighted than human controllers, the automatic "conflict probe" improves safety and allows controllers to handle more planes and space them closer together, along air routes, reducing delays.

When an airline files a flight plan, the system automatically reviews it for conflicts, matching it against the projected position of other airplanes hours down the road. Each position report and request for a different altitude is automatically searched for conflicts. On a controller's screen, any plane with a possible conflict within the next 30 minutes turns red. If the potential conflict is more than 30 minutes away, the plane turns orange.

"It's like an onion -- every layer of our system is built around the conflict probe," says Mr. McCracken.

The New Zealand system began handling air traffic in September 1999. It cost less than 10 million New Zealand dollars, or about US$4.5 million, a figure so low that it makes FAA budget planners gasp.

The project proved so successful that Lockheed Martin, the Bethesda, Md., company that is leading New Zealand's bid for the FAA project, is setting up an air-traffic control research center in Christchurch in cooperation with Airways New Zealand.

With their advanced tracking systems in place, Australia and New Zealand have been able to reduce the horizontal spacing they require between planes flying between the two countries to 60 miles, far less than the 100-mile margin of safety they previously required. And they plan to reduce the distance even more in the future. The tighter spacing expands the capacity of Australia-New Zealand air routes, and translates into fewer delays for air travelers, especially at peak hours, when several flights may be competing to take off at about the same time for the same destination. (The FAA still spaces flights through its Pacific airspace 100 miles apart, a practice that can create backups on popular routes, such as Los Angeles to Tokyo.)

While cooperating closely on the air-traffic control front, Australia and New Zealand have found themselves locked in a fierce rivalry for the FAA contract. The Australians are quick to point out that the New Zealand system suffered two system shutdowns recently. (Airways New Zealand says operator error was to blame.) The New Zealanders, meanwhile, say they think they have the upper hand technologically and that Lockheed Martin's backing gives them more clout with U.S. policy makers.

The FAA plans to choose one of the rival systems for all three of its overwater control centers -- in Oakland, Anchorage, Alaska, and New York -- and hopes to have it running within a year. Both bidders say that's possible, once the FAA finally makes its pick. The agency told the bidders that it hoped to decide between them by the end of this year, then pushed the date back to the end of March. Now, the FAA says June 1 is the first and only official deadline it has set for its decision.

By that time, the FAA itself may be undergoing a makeover. Earlier this month, President Clinton signed an executive order creating an Air Traffic Organization within the FAA whose mission is to function more like a business. Among other things, its chief operating officer will be offered a financial incentive to get flight-control projects done on time and on budget.