I am sure Jane’s Airport Review will forgive me for picking the title of one of their articles but it was so stunning, I could not resist the temptation.
It looks like October was a month of bad news from the world of ATM and I am starting to get a terrible feeling of déjà vu… again.
Back in the times of EATCHIP and ATM2000+ meeting after meeting we were banging the tables, telling anyone who would listen that air traffic management modernization was not rocket science, the technology aspect was almost a no-brainer compared to the kind of cultural change that was necessary on the part of all stakeholders but from ANSPs and airlines most of all, if we were to get anywhere.
When EATCHIP was faltering, ATM2000+ came along and this latter was even signed off by the ECAC Ministers of Transport and what happened? Nothing… or anyway very little compared to the lofty aims defined originally. After a few horrible summers, it was 9/11 and the ensuing economic slump that saved the day. The ATM system would have collapsed had the 5 % year on year traffic demand increase actually materialize.
Then NextGen in the US and the Single European Sky and SESAR in Europe came along. This time it was going to be different… We are well into those programs and here is what we have learned in this black October of the year 2011.
As reported in Aviation Week, the FAA’s En Route Automation Modernization (ERAM) is turning into a major embarrassment. It is four years late and may in fact slip by another two years while the cost is already 330 million bucks over the original budget and it may go to 500 million… ERAM is an essential step in getting NextGen operational, even if ERAM itself is not a NextGen element as such.
As if this was not enough, the FAA’s System Wide Information Management program, which is part of NextGen and one of its mainstays, is falling behind schedule and the costs have increased by a cool 100 million bucks. A lot of money was apparently spent on implementing some SWIM capabilities but with very limited results. There are ambitious goals in the FAA SWIM program but with the implementation suffering delay after delay and coordination less then adequate, the whole program may get the axe from the Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General.
SESAR is running some 300 projects right now… how many of those are on time?
But there is worse. At the recent Civil Air Navigation Services (CANSO) annual summit in Bangkok many speakers spoke candidly over the problems facing air traffic management developments. They were not complaining about the shortcomings or lack of adequate technology. They were complaining about parochial thinking in states and ANSPs and the apparent inability to think in terms of delivering a service rather than insisting on manufacturing a product… with everything to do it with in their own hands. While most other industries divest themselves of elements they are not experts in and buy services from the experts instead, in ATM the view still prevails that communications can only be managed by ourselves and any change will result in the end of the world. That costs and efficiency are suffering as a result does not seem to matter much.
Too much focus on engineering and too little on institutional and governance issues is a killer yet this is exactly what we see to-day in practically all ATM development.
How many times have we warned about this already in the context of EATCHIP and ATM2000+? Apparently 10 years later we have still not moved forward in any meaningful way.
Not that things like Performance Based Navigation (PBN) are in a better shape. ICAO has set a timetable for implementing satellite based approach procedures and States have committed to this timetable. But it looks increasingly that this timetable is like that of some airlines… good only for one thing: to calculate the actual delays from.
The safety and economic benefits of PBN are generally recognized and yet implementation is nowhere as advanced as it should be and, more importantly, could be in view of the technology and existing experience concerned. In particular, the implementation of advanced approach procedures like APV is lagging seriously behind the timetable set by ICAO and agreed by its member States.
Of course the picture is not all black. SESAR will be demonstrating its Initial 4D trajectory management concept in December this year and the work on SWIM in Europe is also showing promise. But…
ATM development has reached a critical juncture. It looks like both NextGen and SESAR will get a boost in funding in the form of a new public-private partnership in the US and a major investment of public funds in the EU, both of which will hopefully also help airlines to equip with the new equipment needed to enjoy the benefits of those major programs. Furthermore, ICAO’s initiative with the ATM Block Upgrade idea (which was in fact EUROCONTROL’s brainchild in the first place) will hopefully keep ATM on the agenda of State authorities everywhere.
But, as we have seen in the past, the success of such projects is often not a question of money. All depends on attitudes and the ability to think out of the box. EATCHIP and ATM2000+ achieved so little not because of a lack of money… It was simply impossible to overcome the outdated mentality of some major stakeholders.
See why Jane’s title, ten years down the road, is cause for worry?
Steve,
As we have come to expect, a really hard-hitting piece, straight to the point. You ask how many of the 300 or so projects SESAR is running are on time. I have no idea, but I would go further, how many of them would actually make any difference to capacity or safety if they were? The record of ATM enhancements is lamentable, deadlines missed and minimal gains to the users (who actually pay for it all, in case anyone has forgotten). It has been a long story of demands on the users to upgrade to new airborne technology but the parallel developments in controller techniques needed to exploit any improvements in the air in simply don’t happen. We all have our favourite examples – mine is the Enhanced Mode S saga; the 6 downlinked Aircraft Parameters, DAPs, included roll angle and track angle rate presumably because someone thought they might eventually form part of some enhanced controller tool/STCA algorithm. The DAPs are all there but what is being done with them 6+ years afterwards? Ummm. The only DAP I know of that is actively used in at least one FIR is Selected Altitude. As I understand it and recall this parameter was an afterthought which appeared after a 5 minute conversation between a very small group of users and RAE/Qinetiq, or whatever they were called at the time. If we’d had 10 minutes, who knows what we could have come up with? Meanwhile ATC is carried on much the same way as it has been since WW2. It isn’t just ATM that has been affected by negative thinking. Why has it taken so long (12 – 15 years by my reckoning, and we’re not there yet) to exploit GNSS navigation? Aversion to new risks on the part of the authorities who seem only too happy to accept old familiar and much bigger ones (e.g. non-precision approach) is part of the problem.
SESAR D2 F1.1.1 contained just a few thoughts on how things could be done differently from a group which was headed by the User Consortium. Building upon what was already available and integrating data from wherever it could be obtained (including in the first instance direct from the Airline Ops Centre) were mentioned. The advantage of this approach is that things might happen. The usual ATM paradigm, which is to wait for overwhelming new equippage rate before even thinking about what to do with it, more or less guarantees they won’t.
I guess what I am saying is that if you want new ideas that have a chance of working in today’s real straightened world, include the users and practitioners early and throughout. These are tough times for the operators who aren’t eactly making money despite cutting everything down to the bone; they aren’t shouting from the rooftops to get involved, because they don’t have spare bodies to offer. SESAR could do worse than recall that enthusiastic and innovative bunch who have been cut out of the game since the end of the definition phase… my phone is eerily silent.