The FAA’s March 2011 NextGen implementation plan is certainly a finely drawn view of what we should expect to see by 2018. Replete with charts, graphs, attractive photography and explanatory text, the document makes for exciting reading. Sculpted as it has been from its 1990s birth as the Next Generation Air Transportation System–and with its clumsy N-GATS acronym dropped in favor of the zippy NextGen–the system has clearly caught the imagination of media and politicians alike.
Possibly, too, its gestation many years ago captured for its developers the theme of Field of Dreams, a then-current movie that gave us “If you build it, they will come,”a notion that one suspects still lives on in the minds of many FAA officials. Unfortunately, several of NextGen’s ongoing development efforts also remind some of us of another movie, the one that brought us the Dark Side of the Force.
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