Whoever came up with the abbreviation CNS (a.k.a. Communications/Navigation/Surveillance) probably had no idea how much damage their invention would cause in air traffic management by perpetuating the kind of silo mentality that keeps many organizations hopelessly divided and experts retreating into their respective ivory towers.
If at least the inventors had the good sense of putting their beloved letters into some kind of logical order, like history, which would have given us NCS… We did navigate first (as in trying to find our way by reading the names of train stations and flying along highways), then communicated at first with lights and hand signals and later via radio and more recently we do surveillance. Not that NCS would have been any better at driving the silo mentality from the face of the earth.
Of course in the old days there was some logic in looking at navigating and communicating as something totally different from each other. You trained for one or the other, aircraft carried separate navigators and radio operators and when radar came along, the wizards of that kit were a completely new breed yet again. It was only logical also that separate fiefdoms should grow up along the letters NCS with hardly any horizontal contact between them. That they should fiercely protect their respective domains was perfectly natural…
Let’s now jump a few decades and arrive in our own brave times where CNS still rules, the fiefdoms are mostly there still… OK, so where is the problem? The problem is, while CNS organization stayed the same, the world around it has completely changed.
Looking at air traffic management along a CNS organization is like hanging the TGV (High Speed Train) behind a steam locomotive and wondering why there is so
much smoke with the train only crawling along.
Look at GPS. That clever system does only two things: it gives you precise time and a position fix. What letter of the magic trio would you allocate to that? We broadcast augmentation signals to the aircraft to make the GPS position fix even more accurate, using a VHF digital link… Is that C or N or S??? Finally, the aircraft will broadcast its GPS derived position for other aircraft and the ground to use in a number of ways. Well, at least that is clear, we are talking about S for surveillance, right? Partly yes but a position can be, and is being, used for many other purposes that fall way outside the traditional definition of surveillance.
Consider Performance Based Navigation, PBN. The poor thing has the N in it and as a result in the big scheme of things it is allocated to the experts dealing with navigation. Yet, when you try to draw up a strategy to implement PBN, very quickly you will find that PBN should really be something like PB/CNS (if you still insist on using those horrible letters) because PBN is anything but limited to navigation only.
The thing is, our world has evolved into a data based endeavor and air traffic management is no exception. In the GPS example, basically the same data is being used and re-used and it is the end-user application that determines whether it ends up being part of navigation or surveillance… or communications for that matter.
Look around in your own organization. You may be lucky and be working for an outfit that has seen the light and has dismantled the silos. But more likely you will find communications experts, navigation experts and surveillance experts labor away in their respective corners, fighting for their own budgets believing they are working on something unique only they understand. Bring them to a company event and watch how many of them actually know each other…
Of course keeping CNS alive gives most of us a nice, comfortable feeling. It imparts a sense of order, tradition and security. It also hinders our ability to think out of the box… The air traffic management world is not about communications, navigation and surveillance. It is about data that can be any of the famous C or N or S without the need, or indeed the possibility, to erect silos around it.
The sooner we dismantle the existing silos, and get rid of the CNS divide, the better for everybody…CNS included.