Wired Magazine went behind the scenes at MITRE as part of a lengthy look at the New York/New Jersey/Philadelphia airspace redesign project. The tone is neutral leaning towards boosterish, though at least one dissenting NATCA voice was included. A brief excerpt:
Controllers will start testing the new departure gates and arrival posts over the next two years, but they’ve been using the modified takeoff headings for months. All the planes leaving Newark used to depart along fairly similar courses, but the redesign’s “dispersal” headings aim to reduce delays by fanning flights out across the sky. [..]
[EWR tower controller Louis] Caggiano isn’t buying it. “They don’t work,” he says with a brevity that suits the simplex radio plugged into his ear. In the lab, the second plane is always ready to go when the first one leaves the ground. But the pilots at Newark aren’t robots, and they don’t move as quickly as the simulation. The airborne flights may be banking according to the new plan, but often the next takeoff isn’t even positioned at the runway centerline yet. Even so, the FAA’s analysis shows that dispersal headings alone are increasing the number of takeoffs by an average of two per hour. (A typical rush hour at Newark sees 40-something departures.) And this is only the first piece of the redesign. Patience, [MITRE strategist Joe] Hoffman says. “The controllers are working on a scale of minutes,” he says. “We’re looking at a scale of years.”
