The Tech Edition
April 09, 2008
FAA partnership prepares for takeoff
$2.5 million in federal funds paves way for NextGen aviation system
By STEVE PRISAMENT
Staff Writer
EGG HARBOR TOWNSHIP – The idea of a partnership between government,
industry and academia for the proposed Aviation Research and Technology
Park at the Federal Aviation Administration William J. Hughes Technical
Center isn’t a new one.
According to John Wiley, manager of technical strategies and integration
at the center, the FAA has partnered with businesses and educational
institutions on numerous projects over its 50 years in southern New
Jersey.
He said establishing the consortium is necessary to produce the Next
Generation Air Transportation System Integrated National Plan, or
NextGen, which is expected to change air traffic control from a
ground-based radar system to a satellite-based system using global
positioning and other technology.
According to Wiley, the FAA is starting from scratch in building NextGen.
A law establishing the Joint Planning and Development Organization
brings together the FAA; the Departments of Commerce, Defense and
Homeland Security; the National Aeronautics and Space Administration;
and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
On March 3, $2.5 million from the federal government was presented to
the South Jersey Economic Development District to proceed with plans for
the 55-acre research park behind the Wawa at the airport circle
intersection of Tilton and Delilah roads.
Wiley said the scope of air traffic control has been expanding.
“It used to be from when you got on the plane to when you got off,” he
said in an interview on Monday, March 31. “Now it’s from when you arrive
at the airport until you leave the airport. We call that ‘curb to curb.’
It will someday get to being from your home to your destination – a
total transportation system.”
He said the government group is already working closely with industry
and academia in a redesign from the bottom up.
“If I’m going to be partners, it helps if I can get them to come close,”
Wiley said of the reason the government is putting up the land and
preliminary work on the research facility. “It helps them because we
already have existing infrastructure. A lot of companies want to work
with us.”
The tech center is a national laboratory like NASA’s Kennedy Space
Center, Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and California and
Los Alamos National Laboratory, also in New Mexico.
Wiley broke down the types of research planned into three major groups:
airframe development, electronics – what the FAA calls avionics – and
ground-based equipment.
Wiley said that with the increased number of people flying today, the
way we use airspace has to change.
“Today we have a controller on the ground who separates the planes,”
Wiley said. “He tells them where to fly, what altitudes, what speeds. As
we redo this, it’s actually going to be done in the airplane.”
He said a limitation of today’s system is that a controller can only
talk to one person at a time.
“So we need more controllers, and we shrink the airspace,” Wiley said.
“That means we have more ‘sectors.’ And controllers pass off planes to
the next sector. Eventually, handing off takes more time than
controlling the airspace.”
He said the country has reached a point where it can no longer add
enough controllers or shrink the space smaller, so the business of
traffic control must move to the air.
“To do this we must have enough information in the cockpit to do it
safely,” Wiley said. “We need to use high-speed transmissions to get
huge amounts of data to the airframes.”
The ground controller would manage a bigger picture and the flows, and
watch for weather situations.
“It’s a fundamental difference,” he said. “Controllers become airspace
managers. It must be effective and efficient – and always safe.”
He said the deeper one looks into the challenges, the more apparent the
need to partner in development becomes.
“We really need to work on these new technologies together if we plan to
pull this thing off,” Wiley said. “And we will be able to. We always
have, and we always will be able to.”
He said the research park, to be built using government funds for lease
by private industry, is a perfect place to work the partnerships.
He said there is hardly any technology company that isn’t in some way
connected to the aviation industry.
“Cell phone technology has been developed; communications has been
driven by the military and the public,” he said. “NASA, of course, is
known for its side benefits – the biggest maybe being Teflon. Computers
have become faster, cheaper and smaller.”
Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast is replacing radar through a
number of FAA-business partnerships.
“It uses GPS system data instead of radar,” Wiley said. “Instead of
sending off signals from the ground and getting them back, each plane
will send off its own GPS signals.”
A key to developing NextGen, he said, is to specify what needs to be
accomplished.
“Don’t specify the technology,” he said. “Only specify the outcome. Let
the companies figure their way of approaching situations.”
By way of example, he said the Hughes center has a machine that tests
runway durability that was built in conjunction with Boeing.
“They were told their big jet was going to have a certain damaging
effect on runways and they were going to be taxed accordingly,” Wiley
said. “They put up some money for us to conduct tests and determine just
what the effect is.”
Now FAA engineers can create 30 years’ worth of runway wear and tear in
three to six months. The National Airport Pavement Test Facility cost
$21 million and took five years to plan and build. It is estimated to
have saved the airline industry about $150 million since 1999 by
improving runway design and cost-effectiveness.
But creating the technology for NextGen is not the only obstacle the
program faces, according to the man who heads all operations planning at
the FAA facility.
“Some of the culture will be a problem,” Wiley said. “How do people
accept new changes? How do pilots accept new changes? Those are going to
be the tough ones – not the technology.
“We’ll build a better widget. The big problem will be getting people to
use it.”
To comment on this story email
steve.prisament@catamaranmedia.com.