Page 5 - Volume12 Number 5

Some Background
There is a lot of history in how the U.S. National Airspace System has advanced in complexity and performance. Some of the most dramatic changes came about over the past decades, as the result of accidents that created public concern which motivated the government to implement changes. One of the most significant examples is the Grand Canyon accident in 1956 when two air transport aircraft collided. The public demanded action and after a series of Congressional hearings, the Federal Aviation Act of 1958 created the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
The FAA was given full control of U.S. airspace, and large organizational and technology investments began to provide more assurance of aircraft separation. A key challenge to the task of providing aircraft separation at that time was that flight crews did not have the means of precisely defining their position in real-time during instrument conditions. World War II had expedited the development of radar that was an available technology to solve this problem, so air traffic separation functions were fundamentally ground-centric from then until the present. Over time, as traffic densities and aircraft speeds increased, additional technologies such as secondary surveillance radar and air traffic automation improved the overall system performance. In parallel with the ground infrastructure developments were advances onboard aircraft such as autopilots, altitude-encoding transponders, digital air data systems, and satellite-based navigation, to name a few. The tremendous improvement in aircraft flight guidance and navigation performance has not been well utilized in the management of air traffic, which set the stage for some ambitious new plans for the future.
The Origins of NextGen
In 2000, another crisis developed in the public mind that the media termed “gridlock” of the nation’s skies. A particularly tough summer storm season in the eastern United States rippled throughout the system and brought commercial air travel woes to passengers across the nation. Congress acted on the growing public concern and through a series of hearings and actions, the Joint Planning and Development Office (JPDO) was created “to develop a unified vision of what the U.S. air transportation system should deliver for the next generation and beyond, to develop and coordinate long-term research plans, and to sponsor cross-agency mission research.”
The JPDO coordinated activities across multiple government agencies, including the Department of Transportation and FAA, NASA, the National Weather Service, the Department of Defense, and the Transportation Security Administration. This multi- agency initiative developed a “Concept of Operations for the Next Generation Air Transportation System” that was intended to drive long-term research and detail planning and was released to the aviation community in 2007.
The scope of this JPDO “ConOps” was a “curb-to-curb” air transportation system with a completion goal of the year 2025 and an end state being an Air Traffic Management (ATM) system founded on an aircraft’s ability to fly precise paths in time/space and the Air Navigation Service Provider’s (ANSP) ability to strategically manage and optimize trajectories throughout the operation.
In 2011 the FAA published their “NextGen Mid-Term Concept of Operations for the National Airspace System” which focused on the areas of the air transportation system, from “gate-to-gate,” for which the FAA is responsible. This FAA ConOps was intended to drive NextGen implementation and had the same timeframe and end state as the original JPDO ConOps.
NextGen Planning and Implementation
In parallel to these government initiatives was a substantial amount of industry input and collaboration. The most notable of these activities was the RTCA NextGen Mid-Term Implementation Task Force (RTCA Task Force 5), which was organized in early 2009. This Task Force represented unprecedented collaboration of more than 300 members of a broad aviation consortium that included representatives from commercial airlines, general aviation, the military, manufacturers and airports. A key interest of the Task Force members was NextGen benefits that could be achieved in the near and mid-term, while efforts continued to build toward longer-term capabilities. By the end of 2009, the Task Force presented the FAA with a unified set of priorities for the following five years of NextGen. The FAA responded in early 2010 with an action plan for each of the Task Force “Tier 1” priorities.
In addition, the RTCA NextGen Advisory Committee (NAC) was established in 2010 as a Federal Advisory Committee. The NAC is made up of high-level representa- tives from throughout the aviation community and is the FAA’s principal source of stakeholder advice on NextGen issues and is tasked to provide recommendations that help “fine-tune” the agency’s plans. The interests and perspectives of King Air owners and operators are rep- resented on the NAC by the chief executives of NBAA, AOPA, and GAMA. The NAC has proved to be very successful in bringing the industry and FAA together with sustained engagement and focus of many aviation stakeholders across the industry and government.
The Committee recognized in mid-2013 that the many industry requests and recommendations in combination with the FAA budget pressures of sequestration demanded that the NAC help the FAA set clear NextGen implementation priorities in combination with transparent plans. By 2014, after a significant amount of prioritization effort by the industry in close consultation with the RTCA Task Force recommendations, the FAA accepted the recommendation to focus NextGen implementation in four focus areas with the establishment of the NextGen Implementation Work Groups (NIWG).
MAY 2018
KING AIR MAGAZINE • 3