With demonstrated benefits of reducing track miles, mitigating noise and lowering fuel burn and emissions, performance-based navigation (PBN) procedures are being adopted on a worldwide basis. But 15 years after Alaska Airlines flew the first procedures, widespread implementation of PBN is uneven and its benefits largely unrealized.
“There’s no doubt PBN is the right thing to do, and yet we’re not seeing the sort of progress we’d like. What is it about PBN that is so hard?” asked Graham Lake, director general of the Netherlands-based Civil Air Navigation Services Organization (Canso). “We know that it is safe and enables precision approaches into places where precision approaches are not available; [that it] encourages application of stable approaches, enables separation in the ATC environment and continuous departure time in dense air traffic environments, yet it’s not being deployed.”
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