At the FAA’s two-day New Technology Workshop last month, the focus was sharply on the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NGATS). The key enablers to get there, according to Nick Sabatini, FAA associate administrator for aviation safety, will be “performance-based” navigation and Internet-like access to critical information such as near real-time weather. With those tools, he stated, “pilots will make precision landings at airports that do not have control towers, radar, or instrument landing systems.”
NGATS will also bring about an aircraft-centric future, in which the air traffic system would “reward” more capable aircraft by allowing them greater operating flexibility, and where the traditional “first come, first served” philosophy could be supplemented by a system that offers priority to the best equipped aircraft. The latter category was defined as meeting advanced performance-based standards in the three areas of required navigation, surveillance and communications performance. Combined, these will meet the broader standard of required total system performance, with ADS-B the key surveillance element. That system is planned for mandatory equipage by 2020.
Sabatini also noted that in the future ATC will become less of a “control” function. That is a particularly interesting comment, since the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (Natca) has become a member of the board of the NGATS Institute, which guides the organization’s agenda. Until now, Natca, under the leadership of John Carr, had declined invitations to join the board. One attendee observed that Natca’s new management undoubtedly recognized that being excluded from any future planning activity was not in the association’s best interests.
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