It was a sunny and warm afternoon when American Airlines captain Russ Chew, IATA European Regional Director Phil Hogge and myself sat down in the little garden behind our house in Brussels to discuss AA’s dissatisfaction with the way the FAA was going about its air/ground digital link program and how AA may participate in EUROCONTROL’s highly successful Petal trials. This was the end of the 90s and controller/pilot digital link communications (CPDLC) were seen as one of the most essential elements in any future ATM system.
Right about that time a few European ANSPs were busy trying to kill Petal (simply because they were not yet ready for CPDLC) but Maastricht UAC was adamant and with the help of IATA, EUROCONTROL staved off the naysayers. AA became a Petal participant and the trials were concluded with success. Unfortunately, the implementation of CPDLC was slowed down to a crawl by events like the crisis following 9/11 and the other subsequent downturns in the industry. While there continued to be movement in Europe, the FAA actually shelved their CPDLC program in 2003.
Of course with NextGen in the works it could not be otherwise: the FAA had to revive digital communications work and this is now incorporated in the, not too imaginatively named, Data Comm program. What is more, bidding is open for the DCIS or Data Communications Integrated Services contract which is, of course, also part of the NextGen environment. The winner will establish and operate the Data Comm network for a period of 17 years with the service being fee based, to be paid by the FAA.
The DCIS acquisition exercise has been going on for some time now and contract award is expected in June this year. This is not a green-field project. For one, the conditions state that the winner will have to use the ARINC and/or SITA air/ground network and it will be the winner’s responsibility to come to an agreement with those providers. There have been problems in the past with getting ARINC and SITA play but those have been resolved and it is not expected that they would once again dish out difficulties for the award winner.
Although FANS1/A will be used, the aim is to go for ATN Baseline 2, a standard that is more advanced than the Baseline 1 currently accepted in Europe. Proper trajectory based operations require capabilities not included in Baseline 1 and so any NextGen use would automatically push the industry to Baseline 2. Of course the FAA will not be developing this baseline on its own, interoperability has always been high on the agenda with digital link and it continues to be essential also in the NextGen/Sesar context.
A vital feature in the DCIS contract to be awarded is the funding for initial equipage of a number of airframes, sufficient for the first benefits to start to accrue and hence pull the rest of the industry towards equipping early. It is hoped that this approach will overcome the age-old problem of stalling equipage because of the lack of benefits. I am especially pleased to see this happening now in the US, since it was originally my idea that EUROCONTROOL should establish a kind of pioneer scheme where seed money would be provided to finance early adopters of CPDLC, a scheme which was very successful I may add.
DCIS will go way beyond the original CPDLC program. It will support what CPDLC did but will also allow direct input of complex clearances into the FMS. As such, it will be a very complex project progressing from airport operations (2015-2018) to en-route (2018-2023) and from simple CPDLC to TBO support. I am concerned though that there is no mention of support for the terminal area. With trajectory based operations being essentially blind to such legacy concepts as a TMA, this may be intentional. Otherwise some of the most important interventions necessary to arrange the streams will be left without digital link support.
In any case, over 10 years after that sunny afternoon, it is nice to see that the importance of air/ground digital link has not diminished at all and that we were on the right track. We were hoping for faster implementation but circumstances have made that impossible, CPDLC had to wait. Hopefully DCIS will fly…