Green Aviation

Saw this cool article on The New York Times.

also theres a really cool graphic on the second link at the end.

Air Traffic System Update Encountered Turbulence
By JAD MOUAWAD
Imagine an air traffic system where planes would no longer have to wait in long rush-hour lines before taking off, or have to circle the skies before landing. In this world, planes would be able to fly more direct routes and land along smoother glide paths.

Those are the changes the Federal Aviation Administration has been promising for years through an ambitious program to modernize the nation’s air traffic system, and replace radars on the ground with satellite technology. The problem is that this new system, called NextGen, will cost an estimated $30 billion to $42 billion to complete. So far, the airlines have been reluctant to put up their half of the money for a system that will not be operational for at least a decade.

But NextGen, which stands for the Next Generation Air Transportation System, received a boost on Friday with House passage of a $59.7 billion bill that finances the F.A.A. over the next four years, providing much-needed stability to the agency’s flagship program. Since 2007, the F.A.A. bill had been repeatedly stalled and its budget temporarily extended 18 times.

The bill, which was approved 223 to 196, largely along party lines, also cuts overall spending on aviation by $4 billion and includes a provision that would curb the right of airline employees to unionize. The bill from the Republican-dominated House must still be reconciled with a vastly different version that the Senate, controlled by Democrats, approved in February. The White House has said it will veto a final bill that includes the labor provision.

And Representative Nick J. Rahall of West Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, assailed the deep cuts in the F.A.A. budget, which, he noted, came a week after two airliners landed at Washington National Airport without being able to contact the single air traffic controller on duty.

Modernizing the nation’s current air traffic system, which is based on technology invented during World War II, is universally seen as critical to coping with the congested airspace over the United States and to accommodate growing traffic. In its latest forecast, the F.A.A. estimated that United States airlines would carry 1.3 billion passengers in 2031, up from about 700 million in 2011.

Just like GPS for cars, satellite navigation gives pilots their exact location at any given time. Air traffic controllers would not have to wait 30 seconds for the next sweep of their radar screen to know the locations of planes. Radar’s limits means that controllers must now keep planes three miles apart when they approach airports. This limits the number of planes that can land each hour and contributes to the longer lines for takeoff.

“Today’s airspace is woefully antiquated,” said Steve Fulton, who helped pioneer satellite-guided navigation with Alaska Airlines in the 1990s and now works for GE Aviation.

Airlines burn an extra 10 percent of fuel today, he said, as they circle complicated approach routes or are put on a holding pattern by controllers juggling several flights.

“Instead of a chaotic and unplanned and unpredictable system, NextGen would provide precise synchronization,” he said.

Because of the surge in traffic in recent decades, the current system is often operating at the limits of its capacity. Robert W. Mann Jr., an aviation industry expert in Port Washington, N.Y., estimated that delays and airport congestion cost the industry as much as $12 billion a year in lost time and extra fuel costs.

The United States has also been lagging other countries that are already moving into this digital navigation age, including Australia, Canada, China, and several European countries like Sweden.

Yet airlines, which continue to be low in cash, have been reluctant to commit before they get a clearer sense on how the F.A.A. plans to transition to this new technology.

“Basically, it comes down to economics,” Mr. Mann said. “This is an industry that is not operationally driven. It is financially driven. And unfortunately, the airlines have learned to be very circumspect.”

Experts said the repeated delays in financing over the last few years have contributed to NextGen’s slow pace. The F.A.A. also has a history of being unable to complete large-scale investment programs on time and on budget.

In a report last month, the Department of Transportation’s inspector general said that another of the F.A.A.’s major technological programs, called En Route Automation Modernization, was four years behind schedule and could end up costing as much as $500 million more than its initial budget of $2.1 billion. The program, one of the building blocks of NextGen, is intended to track airliners at cruising altitude. It has suffered software glitches, including tagging flight numbers to the wrong planes, at its initial testing centers in Seattle and Salt Lake City.

“Yes, we have not been perfect in the past in technological rollouts,” said Michael P. Huerta, the F.A.A.’s deputy administrator. “But this one is different.”

Of NextGen, he added, “We are beyond this being a research and planning project and we are very much in implementations.”

The airlines are broadly supportive of the F.A.A.’s goals to make the system more efficient, said Sharon Pinkerton, the senior vice president for legislative and regulatory policy at the Air Transport Association, the industry’s main trade group. But the F.A.A. needs to establish some clearer benchmarks on how it plans to move forward, she said.

“Airlines would like to ensure that the F.A.A. is able to demonstrate they can deliver the promised benefits of NextGen, especially from projects in which airlines have already equipped planes,” said Ms. Pinkerton, a former F.A.A. assistant administrator for aviation policy, planning and environment.

Alaska Airlines, for instance, has been using a satellite-guidance tool called R.N.P., or Required Navigation Performance, that allows its planes to take off and land along more direct routes than traditional approaches, even in bad weather with low visibility.

Southwest Airlines has invested $150 million to equip most of its 600 Boeing 737s with this technology.

The F.A.A. said it has established more than 900 procedures and routes for planes equipped with the satellite technology at about 200 airports. But carriers complain that many of them are simply overlaid on the old radar-based approaches, which makes them far less effective. As a result, the benefits to the airlines have been diluted.

“These new aircraft have extraordinary capabilities that we can’t use because we have older planes crowding the airspace and because we don’t have the required navigation capabilities,” said David Cush, the chief executive of Virgin America, which has a younger fleet equipped with satellite technology.

Southwest, for instance, uses the technology at only 11 airports, including Los Angeles and Raleigh-Durham.

Mike Van de Ven, Southwest’s chief operating officer, said the F.A.A. should give landing priority to planes with the latest satellite navigation tools onboard, instead of on a first-come-first serve basis, as is the case today.

“If you have made the investment in the equipage to allow your plane to be more efficient,” Mr. Van de Ven said, “we believe you ought to get preferential treatment.”

Steve Dickson, senior vice president for flight operations at Delta Air Lines, said the airlines had a long history of investing in technologies the F.A.A. required, but that never paid off.

“It’s fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me,” he said.

“Right now, based on our track record, the benefits accrue to the late adopters. We need to change that paradigm if we want to move forward.”

http://visualization.geblogs.com/visualization/optimized_descents/