Video: NextGen is touted as the antidote to gridlock in the air travel system, which is forecast to be serving one billion passengers a year by 2021, up from 713 million last year.
Southwest Airlines Flight 658 pushes back from the gate and shows up as a blip on a radar screen in the tower at Dulles International Airport just before 7:30 a.m. Wednesday.
For the next 90 minutes, the plane will move as a blip across one radar screen after another, as a system introduced in the 1950s tracked and guided its progress to Chicago.
The FAA’s upgrade from land-based radar navigation to GPS-satellite navigation.
The safety of the Boeing 737 and 118 passengers will fall to at least 10 air traffic controllers and their radar displays — at Dulles, and in Warrenton, Leesburg, Indianapolis, Aurora and Elgin, Ill., and at Midway Airport.
The limitations of that radar, which sweeps like the beam of a lighthouse, will require Flight 658 to fly miles out of its way and burn about 67 additional gallons of jet fuel. Because a jet plane can fly more than a mile and a half in the time it takes for that radar beam to come around again, the plane must be kept three to five miles from the nearest aircraft.
The pilot probably has a more sophisticated guidance system in his car than in his plane.
Now the Obama administration has embarked on the single most ambitious and expensive
national transportation project since completion of the interstate highway system: a program called the
Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen).
The NextGen concept sounds simple: Replace an air traffic system based on 60-year-old radar with a satellite-based Global Positioning System (GPS) network that would be far more versatile and efficient. In reality, it is an extraordinarily complex undertaking, threatened with delay by airline fears that the government will not deliver the system in time to justify their expenditures.
NextGen demands the largest investment ever made in civil aviation: between $29 billion and $42 billion for equipment, software and training by 2025. The cost would be shared by a federal government struggling with budget constraints and an airline industry that has been drained by years of recession and high fuel prices. Those tensions over funding threaten to slow the launch of NextGen, despite near-universal support for the program, and delays could prove costly.
NextGen is touted as the antidote to gridlock in the air travel system, forecast to be serving 1 billion passengers a year by 2021, up from 713 million last year.
With GPS precision, planes would be able to travel packed skies in safety at much closer distances. They would be able to fly direct routes, unlike in the current system, which relies heavily on flying to waypoints before turning to a final destination.
Direct routing would save airlines billions in fuel costs and minimize pollution. It would permit far more precise choreography of planes at airports, reducing the amount of fuel wasted waiting for takeoff or burned because planes waiting to land are ordered into holding patterns.
For passengers, NextGen would cut flight delays, eliminate time spent on the runway waiting to take off, shorten the flight time once airborne and bring fuel savings that promise to keep ticket prices lower.
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