FAA: Upgrading air-traffic control will reduce disruptions

A fire that knocked out air-traffic control across a five-state region around Chicago last Friday revealed the fragility of current navigation equipment. The Federal Aviation Administration is upgrading the system, but the process will cost billions of dollars and require decades to complete.

Government and industry officials generally support the program called NextGen, which is intended to update all aspects of flights to boost safety and efficiency, but its costs have risen, funding has been disputed in Congress and airlines have been slow to adopt the new equipment until the benefits become more obvious.

FAA Administrator Michael Huerta says NextGen, now budgeted at about $1 billion a year, will reduce flight disruptions by monitoring planes more closely through satellite technology rather than ground-based radar and communicating with them using radio over the Internet. The fire that knocked out communications equipment at the control center in Aurora, Ill., canceled 3,750 flights at O'Hare and Midway airports from Friday through Monday.

"NextGen tools will provide more accurate information and airspace flexibility in a much more dynamic way than we are able to do today," Huerta told the Air Traffic Control Association this week.

The program would track planes more precisely, plan flight paths more directly to save fuel and communicate electronically between controllers and pilots to reduce spoken errors. But Huerta said long-term planning is difficult because of congressional budget disputes that furloughed controllers briefly in 2013. He said agency officials will meet with stakeholders to gauge priorities balancing NextGen against maintaining current equipment.

Watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Transportation Department's inspector general's office warned that NextGen is costing more than anticipated and taking longer to implement than expected, while FAA maintains that good strides are being made.

A 2012 GAO study found half of 30 NextGen projects experienced delays, and 11 of them cost a combined $4.2 billion more than originally estimated. The 11 projects, some of which began in the late 1990s, were originally projected to cost a combined $7 billion and had grown to nearly $11.2 billion, according to GAO.

An inspector general's report Sept. 11 focused on part of NextGen, a system for tracking planes more closely called Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B). The FAA has built 634 radio stations to cover the contiguous U.S., but results are limited because equipment hasn't been upgraded for air-traffic controllers or aboard planes to use it. The FAA has ordered airliners to have the equipment by 2020.

All told, the FAA plans to spend $4.5 billion on ADS-B by 2035, an increase of $400 million from original estimates and $588 million more than anticipated benefits, according to the inspector general.

Seth Young, director of the Center for Aviation Studies at the Ohio State University, ​​​​said the upgrading process is difficult because it requires replacing equipment from the first 100 years of air-traffic control with the latest technology costing billions of dollars while planes continue to fly.

"The only way that could be done is incrementally," Young said.

Ultimately, NextGen is a tremendously positive infrastructure upgrade to the air-traffic management system, he said. "It's the interstate highway of our generation."

The FAA's paramount concern for safety means slowing down the number of flights when surveillance fails to avoid collisions.

"When they have a catastrophic outage like we did with this Chicago event, they leap into action," said Sid McGuirk, associate professor of air-traffic management at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla. "A lot of people are going to sleep on the floor of airports, but nobody is going to die."

The reason the fire disrupted so many flights is because the Aurora facility is one of 20 control centers across the contiguous 48 states that cover vast swaths of land. These so-called en route centers coordinate flights at least 18,000 feet in the air, in Aurora's case across a 91,000-square-mile area.

The Aurora facility handles an estimated 15,000 flights a day, including takeoffs and landings at airports, but also all the airliners just flying through the area, McGuirk said.

En route centers handle the top layer of what air-traffic experts describe as an upside-down layer cake. The smallest layer closest to the ground is where tower controllers direct planes around an airport.

In busy areas such as Chicago or New York, the next layer of the cake, which might be 30 or 40 miles in diameter, keeps planes separated from O'Hare and Midway.

Other regional controllers in Minneapolis, Kansas City, Cleveland and Indianapolis picked up the slack for Chicago after the fire. But those centers didn't have the automated flight-plan information that the airlines submit to FAA, which then distributes specifically to each regional center.

"It's not sent to the Indianapolis center, it's not center to the Cleveland center – it's sent to Chicago center," McGuirk said. "The data is overwhelming."

Controllers have had to contact airlines and type up flight plans by hand since the fire. Under NextGen's planned satellite tracking, rather than ground-based radar, en route and regional control centers will be able to track planes farther than they "see" now, Huerta said.

"For example, in the outage at Chicago center, we would be able to have each of the neighboring en route centers reach into Chicago center's airspace and take control of all of the radios used to control aircraft there," Huerta said.

McGuirk offered one caveat, however, that controllers outside Chicago might not be as familiar with specific geography and concerns in the neighboring region.

"They don't know the traffic flows, they don't know the nuanced information that a Chicago-center controller would know," he said.