Is the FAA’s billion-dollar-a-year NextGen program devolving into a patchwork of technology demonstrations, refined routings to discrete airports and reduced aircraft separations over mainly water? Is the agency’s promised comprehensive overhaul of the National Airspace System chasing its predecessor grand vision—Free Flight—into oblivion?
One couldn’t help entertaining that thought during a panel discussion at the recent American Association of Airport Executives conference in Washington, D.C. The panel’s theme, “NextGen Now,” was a gut check of the ATC modernization effort, which has been at least a decade in the making. The topic brought to the fore some outspoken critics of NextGen’s progress, none more prominent than the panel moderator, Boeing vice president of air traffic management (ATM) strategy Neil Planzer. In an interesting juxtaposition, Planzer sat at one end of the panel; Steve Bradford, the FAA’s chief scientist for architecture and NextGen development sat at the other.
