Exactly one third, that is what! The P is ok, the B is ok but the N? That is what is wrong and in a big way too! Let me explain.
Recently we had a very successful workshop on PBN and the agenda included a presentation on modern surveillance techniques and another one on cost-benefit analyses tailored to performance based systems. It was soon clear that several experts (mostly outside the workshop) thought that the surveillance presentation was out of place in a meeting on PBN. After all, PBN is dealing with navigation and not surveillance.
There you go, the good old silo mentality again! Thou shall not mix things from different silos!
Do a local reality check. How is your organization set up? Do you have separate departments for navigation, surveillance and communications? Ask someone from surv or com what PBN stands for… Are you getting the picture?
PBN traces its ancestry to RNP which was/is of course Required Navigation Performance. There the N did make sense as RNP was indeed about navigation performance. But when the idea was expanded and elevated to PBN, the N became a limitation, an excuse for many to think they were not concerned with it.
The inventors of the term PBN meant well, no doubt about that. But by not thinking through how much wider than just navigation the
concept they were introducing really was, they laid the foundation of the exact silo approach we are all working so hard to break down.
The result? People on the surveillance or communications side of the business tend to ignore PBN, thinking it is creating requirements only for navigation and that is not their desk. Even worse, some experts in air traffic management operational concept work tend to ignore PBN, convinced that they will get the requirements from the navigation experts… and so on. Silos once built are notoriously difficult to break down and environments sprouting from silos are notoriously poor at fulfilling their tasks.
The pretty wide-spread uncertainty about what PBN really means and to whom and why, is a good indicator of the height to which the silos have already been erected.
And all this because of the N in PBN. One third of the damn thing is wrong.
Now what about changing the N to an O and calling the new concept Performance Based Operations? Instead of focusing on just navigation, PBO could be the frame stretching horizontally and unifying the requirements set against communications, navigation and surveillance plus all the other things that need to be considered for a good performance based system.
Most of the current PBN documentation could survive with only minor changes, so no problem there. A lot of new material would need to be written of course and that might be a problem…
But again it might not. After all, PBO would not be seen as concerning the other guy only and who would want to be left out of this brave new world?