While preparing for traffic to double and perhaps even triple in the coming decades, the FAA has made clear that putting up the ground-based infrastructure to support that traffic will be expensive, ultimately costing billions of dollars. In his May 9 Congressional testimony before the House subcommittee on aviation on the future of air traffic control modernization, FAA Deputy Administrator Robert Sturgill stated that preliminary estimates to achieve the end state NextGen system range from $15 billion to $22 billion. However, until recently the agency had not provided an estimate of how much operators will pay to be in compliance with the demands of the brave new NextGen world.
Sturgill told the committee that Mitre–the agency’s major think tank–working in conjunction with FAA officials, had concluded that the most probable range of total avionics costs to system users would be $14 billion to $20 billion. Mitre had, however, cautioned that a wide range of costs was possible, depending on the bundl-ing of avionics and the alignment of equipage schedules, and explained that the range reflected uncertainty about equipage costs for individual aircraft, the number of very light jets that will operate in high-performance airspace and the amount of time out of service required for equipage installation.
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