Author: Jim C

Wow, what a gorgeous day yesterday.  I’m sorry I didn’t have my camera with me.  I was feeling a little out of sorts when I headed to the airport where I had a plane reserved for 17:00.  I decided I was just going to do some takeoffs and landings and call it a day, but when I got in the plane and got airborne it was too nice to cut it that short.  I did a few short field and soft field takeoffs and landings and then I headed northeast to look at the leaves.  It was 27°C, winds 100@05, altimeter 30.38, and smooth as glass. It looks like the colors will peak in the next week around here, but they were still pretty impressive.  This was one of those days when you realize what a privilege it is to be a pilot.

I haven’t had the time or motivation to write much here lately, but did want to post some links to some of the stuff that I’ve been reading.  This post will be dedicated to the aviation stuff, I may do a similar post for religion and/or politics soon.  I really enjoyed Don Brown’s “Say Again?” column that he did for a number of years for AvWeb (thanx to Don for providing the link to the archives).  Don is a retired air traffic controller out of the Atlanta ARTCC (Atlanta Center).  As a new pilot and then a new instrument student and finally as an instrument-rated pilot, I appreciated Don’s perspective from the other end of the radio.  Don retired from the FAA in 2006 (I believe), but I recently discovered that he continues to write about the aviation industry in his Get the Flick blog.  Some of what he writes is political, too.  He doesn’t have anything good to say about they idea of privatizing ATC (and I have to say I mostly agree with him on that).  Anyway, here are a couple of his recent (or even not-so-recent) posts that you might be interested in.

• Controllers have cure for the energy crisis 
• This is the clearest explanation of the problems with airline delays, to use Don’s line “it’s the runways, stupid”
• More on the same problem 
• This one is about the FAA’s NextGen.  The problems can’t all be solved by new technology, it still requires people and we’ve been losing them on the ATC end of the radio at an alarming rate the last few years due to the FAA’s refusal to bargain in good faith with the controllers.
• And this one, points out that now is the time to fix the FAA before it is too late.

Another blog I’ve  been reading lately is JetWhine.  I loved the picture of the flight crew in this post, he’s right it wasn’t that long ago that flying (not to say anything of military aviation) was seen as a (primarily) male endeavor.  There was also this note about the new Jeppesen VFR+GPS charts.  I can’t wait for these to make it to my part of the country.

Flying Magazine has a weekly e-mail newsletter you can subscribe to and I do. Normally, what I read there is mostly a recap of news stories that I probably heard of through one of the many aviation-related RSS feeds I follow, but this morning’s had a brief article by J. Mac McClellan under the “Left Seat” banner (which I haven’t yet seen posted to their website, I’ll update this post with a link back to it if I see it show up there) that I thought was pretty interesting. I don’t like posting someone else’s content in its entirety but I think this is worth it.

Will VORs and ILS Really Go Away?

It was more than 15 years ago when Richard Collins and I met with the then head of FAA airway and navigation and planning, and he laid out a detailed plan that would have decommissioned virtually all VOR stations and ILS equipment in less than 10 years. GPS, with the added accuracy and dependability of wide area augmentation system (WAAS), was going to make navigation stations bolted to the ground unnecessary and irrelevant. Obviously, it didn’t happen.

Now the FAA is talking about starting to scale back the national network of VOR stations by 2010 because GPS and WAAS are a reality and we really don’t need those costly to maintain navigation radio stations. Will it happen this time? I doubt it.

It would be easy to blame the many thousands of general aviation airplane owners who have not yet installed a GPS with certified IFR capability, and the much larger group yet to embrace WAAS. And that group, through AOPA and other associations, will complain, but they are not the real drag on transition to GPS, WAAS and the next generation (NextGen) air traffic control system. The real foot dragging comes from the airlines.

Though Garmin in particular has delivered many thousands of WAAS-equipped GPS systems for personal and business airplanes, the jets, especially the airlines, lag behind. Even the best-equipped business jets have been slower to get WAAS equipment approved and installed than piston singles.

Part of the reason is that certifying anything — particularly primary navigation systems — is just more complicated, costly and time consuming for a transport category airplane than for a light airplane. Another issue is that the flight management systems (FMS) found in nearly every jet guide the airplane anywhere by already using a combination of inputs from GPS, inertial navigation sensors, VOR and DME to navigate. A WAAS GPS adds very little tangible capability to a jet. And because the giant majority of runways used by jets — particularly the airlines — have ILS approaches, WAAS adds nothing to lower approach minimums as it can at small airports served only by non-precision approaches.

When you consider the dire financial straits of the airlines, and the huge cost of putting an airplane out of service to install an expensive and redundant GPS WAAS system, the airlines’ enthusiasm for WAAS is really diminished. They already have the equipment to fly direct en route to an ILS approach with minimums down to a half-mile visibility or less. No way they want to spend money for benefits that are in the future, not today.

A notable exception among the airlines is Southwest, which is spending millions to bring its fleet up to required minimum performance (RNP) capability, including WAAS, in the hope it can fly precise departure and arrival procedures and save a few miles per trip. But as far as I know Southwest is alone among the major airlines in spending millions now in the hope of getting it back in fuel savings over future years.

So, sadly, I think a combination of factors will keep the FAA paralyzed. It will announce again, and again, that it is moving on, but the primary user of the ATC system, the airlines, won’t follow. Even if the FAA sets a hard deadline and warns that it will shut off VORs, and then ILS approaches, on a firm schedule, it has no credibility. It has made such announcements before and they were ignored, and the schedule was not followed.

Some wag once said that changing the ATC system is like overhauling an engine while it’s running. And that’s very true. So far the inertia to preserve the status quo is more powerful than any benefits of change that can’t be immediately converted into cost savings. When will all of this change? I don’t know, and neither does the FAA.