As a boy, a favorite movie of mine was The Crowded Sky, a tale of air traffic mishaps that led to a mid-air collision between an airliner and a Navy jet because the equipment was unreliable. Today’s skies are far more crowded but we’re still relying on the same outdated air traffic equipment to prevent a similar real life tragedy from occurring.
Each day the United States has 26,000 scheduled passenger flights, carrying over 2.5 million people, with 5,000 aircraft aloft at any given moment. That’s almost six times as many miles as Americans flew in the era of The Crowded Sky, yet the modernization of air traffic has not kept pace.
Antiquated equipment results in flight delays that cost passengers, airlines, and airports $28 billion in 2018 alone. The good news is there is a fix for this problem and the price tag is less than what one year of these delays cost. For $20 billion the Federal Aviation Administration can finish modernizing air traffic control and implement the NextGen system to help American passengers and airlines save billions in lost time, labor, fuel, and other costs.
The Next Generation Air Transportation System, or NextGen, is a multi-faceted blend of technologies centered around satellite-based GPS systems for air traffic control instead of scattered ground-based radars. NextGen transforms aviation by providing exact information on where aircraft are located and on weather conditions, allowing easy adjustment to flight paths. It also expedites everything by adding digitized communications that allow air traffic and weather data to feed directly into airplanes’ flight computers, instead of being manually input after radio conversations between pilots and controllers.
The information improvements from satellite-based navigation also allows tighter spacing between takeoffs and landings. Digitized communication between aircraft and controllers saves several minutes for each flight, replacing the jargon-filled back-and-forth vocal exchanges between pilots and air traffic controllers. Less time wasted on the ground with engines running reduces both noise pollution and fuel consumption, meaning less emissions and cleaner air. This ability to launch and land more aircraft each hour, and to reduce the en-route spacing between flights, will also shorten the time of each flight and add much-needed capacity to the National Airspace System.
There is no question that NextGen will transform air travel, shorten flight times, reduce delays, improve safety, increase capacity, save money, and allow innovation. The only question is whether Washington will delay this progress by not funding it properly.
Until the FAA is fully modernized, our airspace cannot handle our needs. The outmoded system already is overwhelmed by commercial air travel, military flights, and the private pilots of general aviation. The current status quo would be enough to cause concern but even more air traffic is coming, and fast.
The emergence of drones will be a major additional strain on our air traffic control systems, with 1.3 million registered and numbers growing rapidly. The White House proposed budget for FY2020 allocates $130 million just to start developing ways to monitor drones with air traffic control. Delivery-by-drone will add massive numbers, and so will increasing use by law enforcement, traffic monitoring, infrastructure inspection, monitoring of crops and livestock, and other uses.
Air taxis are also no longer the stuff of science fiction. Uber has announced plans to launch a service and it’s a sure bet that their competitors won’t be far behind. North Carolina is budgeting money to lead the development of air taxis, building on its “First in Flight” motto from its Wright Brothers days. They didn’t have to worry about crowded skies, but we do.
There are other lingering controversies in government aviation, including the big question of privatizing air traffic control and escaping the red tape of doing everything with federal workers. But whoever runs the system will need the best equipment, and there is no controversy over the need to adopt the NextGen improvements. Wherever transportation budget savings are sought, travelers should not be paying the hidden $28 billion annual tax of unnecessary flight delays.
Congress will have many debates about transportation spending in the coming months, but any failure to prioritize NextGen’s progress would be the biggest flight delay of them all.
Former Congressman Ernest Istook chaired the Transportation Subcommittee on the House Appropriations Committee.
