Fly NextGen: How did you get interested in NextGen and DayJet?
Bruce Holmes: In a broad brush answer, the decades of research and technology I’ve been involved in have built upon themselves towards the general subject of how technology strategies and public policy strategies function together to make better use of small aircraft in community airports for public transportation.
Back in 2007, I had 30 years of service at NASA, and the agency had begun to move away from research and technology development for aviation applications. Even though that subject matter was disappearing from the scene in NASA, it was reappearing in the private sector in the form of companies like DayJet and a few others who at the time were kind of clawing their way into existence.
Fly NextGen: What can you say about the promise of DayJet Corporation and its demise?
Bruce Holmes: For DayJet, the collapse of the investment banking industry in America was clearly a trigger event. Had our investment capital not dried up, we would be having a very different discussion right now. Even so, we were rapidly learning things that we needed to do differently, and we were heading toward doing differently, and of course flight trajectory management (using NextGen technologies) was one of them.
One of the things that made what happened with DayJet so disheartening was we knew we were going to be able to implement a trajectory optimization system in our fleet. We were convinced that we could produce efficiency gains at least in the range of 15 percent, and quite a bit more than that, in many cases. We knew it would take a couple of years, or even 3 to 5 years. We also knew that this pace of implementation was years ahead of what JPDO, or the airlines, or most others had imagined. The reasons we could do it was because we were small, we were agile, and we had no legacy — no sea anchors slowing us down.
There were other factors that played into our ability to accelerate toward profitability. The airplane, while it was the correct size, performance and cost to launch into this new per-seat, on-demand market, wasn’t quite ready for intensive utilization. We needed the ability to create a fleet dispatch reliability of 90%; this was not possible at the early stage of maturity of the airplane, meaning we depended on having many more aircraft in the fleet than those required for revenue service. The airplane was headed there, and arguably is going to be there in another year or so. It just wasn’t ready for primetime.
On top of that, we didn’t have enough airplanes to cover the regional market space that we’d laid out. We knew from our modeling that at a fleet size of about 50 airplanes, we could sustain break-even. We were about a year away from growing to that number of aircraft in the fleet. And so, in the absence of operating capital that would carry us for a year, we had no choice.
Fly NextGen: How about customers, and the market generally?
Bruce Holmes: I would say that educating the customers was a Herculean task. We were able to get 2,500 customers sort of one at a time in a very deliberate, very personal engagement process. Getting customers more efficiently educated would have become a major effort had the events of the fall not unfolded the way they did.
Educating community leaders and airport management and public administrators to think of the sorts of airports we were using was also challenging. Many think of the airport as kind of a place where there is a fair amount of flight instruction that goes on, there is a little bit of charter that goes on, and there might be a commercial side of the airport with a few flights a day by the [regional jets] and so forth. The airport leaders and community leaders really were slowly gearing up in their ability to help with the public education and airport infrastructure readiness that would serve a future public transportation portal function.
For example, if you pull up to an airport and ask, “How fast can you turn my airplane?” and they said, “I can turn you in 20 minutes.” You say, “Oh, that’s not too bad.” But then you ask them, “Well, what if I have ten airplanes here at the same time? How fast can you turn those?” Of course their eyes get wide and the answer is, “Well, 20 minutes per airplane.” So, you wind up behind the curve in these situations.
The other part is that the physical infrastructure of a lot of these airports is just not up to sort of what you might call current public transportation system standards. You drive to some of the airports on a gravel road, of all things. Or the marking and signage that lead the customer to where your boarding portal is –it’s poor if it exists at all. Not many air travelers in America know what “general aviation” even means. To them, it is a mysterious phrase that appears on some airport signs. So, even the language of this new industry has not have a chance to mature.
All of that said, we proved the market exists, that the business model can work, that the aircraft size and cost is in the right space, and that the technology for real-time fleet management works.
Fly NextGen: What’s next for per-seat on-demand?
Bruce Holmes: The technology platform for operation of the business worked. The platform provided the ability to do the real-time optimization and disruption management, and to have a completely automated and completely integrated air carrier operational platform — from customer booking to pilot and passenger assignment to aircraft to compliance management to maintenance. With a tool such as this, per-seat, on-demand air carrier service at larger fleet size becomes very practical.
The aircraft development side of the story is far from over. The single-engine jets like the Cirrus and the Diamond and the Eclipse — operated in fleets with single pilots — create the potential to have a business model which closes much more strongly with one passenger on the airplane. In our DayJet operations, with two pilots flying the Eclipse 500, if we had one passenger we lost a little money, if we had two we made a little, if we had three we made a lot. In a business model built around single-engine jets flown in single-airborne crew operations – perhaps with a virtual or support crew in a remoted command center – a per-seat, on-demand service might reach much deeper into the marketplace.
Fly NextGen: What’s on your agenda for 2009?
Bruce Holmes: Well, I’m eager to give this new idea of dynamic trajectory management, real-time trajectory management, a good shot. And so a group of us are exploring the application of agent-based approaches to the challenge. We’re meeting with potential funders, collaborators, and partners to explore how to build a business case and the business and technology architectures to go with it. What’s needed is a method by which both the government and the industry operators in the air space could have access to a means of creating trajectory plans, managing those plans in an interactive way so that you wind up de-conflicting trajectories.
Initially, that would occur in advance of takeoff, then ultimately in real time, and produce flow control out of the basic optimization, the de-confliction of trajectories in the airspace. There’s a set of tools that we had developed in DayJet Corporation for our air carrier operation that form a foundation for those capabilities. We’re going to explore how those tools might be applied to this problem. So, that’s a main course of interest.
I am also involved on the management team for an algal fuels project at the College of William and Mary Research Institute. NextGen provides a certain level of “greening” of aviation; the rest of the story will need to come from advancements in alternative fuels and propulsion systems.
Fly NextGen: Could you contrast the approach to flow control, the approach to de-conflicting that you’re interested in pursuing in this venture, with the way that flow control is done today?
Bruce Holmes: Today, flow control is managed at the FAA Command Center, and there are a set of controller tools for managing specific aircraft flight plans — things like ERAM [En Route Automation Modernization], TMA [Traffic Management Advisor] — those tools basically allow the FAA to produce what you might call a manual metering of traffic. It’s really kind of a hammer and tongs approach, not automated. So, the FAA is eagerly working towards automation of that system.
We think is possible to approach the optimization using agent-based approaches: agent-based technology, agent-based modeling, agent-based negotiation, agent-based engineering coming out of the world of complexity science from the past ten or fifteen years. As far as we can tell, those tools have not been applied to the business of making trajectory management work.
Fly NextGen: I’m interested in your perspective on who has done a good job of taking advantage of opportunities to push forward on NextGen.
Bruce Holmes: Companies like Naverus, for example, are very innovative in deploying performance-based navigation routings for customers around the world — unfortunately, not so much in the U.S. yet, except for their work with Southwest Airlines. Another company, L3Comm-ACSS, has innovated in the cockpit systems using ADS-B in and out for spacing and merging functions. And they’ve got more ideas about how to make this technology work even better.
Companies like Garmin, for example, have produced their highway in the sky and synthetic vision system, and now have added a machine enhanced vision capability, so that that the kinds of aircraft that make sense for the on-demand market will have the capability of seeing through the clouds and of flying in a performance-based airspace system. I’ve left off many of the other innovators, but they are all out there with capabilities to vastly reduce the cost of making the airspace system work better.
Also, I think the FAA’s office – the Surveillance Broadcast Services Office – has been walking a political tightrope in getting ADS-B deployed. They’ve done a fabulous service to the American public in pressing forward. I know there are plenty of folks out there who are not comfortable with all the nuances and some of the shortcomings of the current ADS-B system. But getting this ball rolling in this climate, this climate of many conflicting interests is a miracle, and they’re pulling it off. The engineers among us want the complete solution out of the box; the operational reality is that we need the ADS-B system deployed in any form, in its current form, just to learn how to solve the problems at the next level of advancement.
Fly NextGen: That sounds like a tall order.
Bruce Holmes: I think that the hard part in front of us is that industry has some major decisions they would make but cannot because of the absence of policy on the part of government. The simple truth is that the legacy carriers are not in a position financially to adopt new technology. They just can’t. They are consolidating into larger aircraft and larger markets and larger companies in order to survive between increasing operating costs and lower fares with thinner profit margins. These trends create some tension between what’s needed to accelerate NextGen and how to do it.
In the waning days of DayJet’s operations, two of the major carriers in Florida said that they would be ceasing all intrastate air service in Florida, and of course for a state like Florida — actually for any state of any size — that’s a disaster in terms of economic development opportunities for the communities that are going to lose service. So, if there is an opportunity to accelerate NextGen, it will certainly be in the fleets of business and air taxi and on-demand air carriers who are not so inhibited by the market and operating challenges of the scheduled air carriers.
Fly NextGen: Which policies or policy frameworks would you like to see crafted to deal with these issues?
Bruce Holmes: I think there is a case for a policy framework around how you are going to fill the vacuum as the scheduled carriers leave 200 cities in the 21st century, and in particular it has to do with infrastructure. So, it’s a set of infrastructure policies that really need to be thought through: as scheduled air service consolidates to fewer markets, how do you keep from economically and geographically isolating communities by the hundreds across America?
Part of the answer could be deployment of the ADS-B technology for more than just en route surveillance. Let’s deploy it for fleet management and surface surveillance — not just at the stations around the country where you get the en route coverage, but at every airport in America. Imagine the effect on capacity, access, and safety if every public use airport had ADS-B surveillance to the surface. Let’s create an infrastructure investment that builds on the early steps the FAA has already taken for getting segment one and segment two laid by ITT – the company awarded the contract by the FAA for ADS-B system installation and operation.
In addition, there is a policy challenge affecting the business case for design of performance based procedures in the NAS today. The FAA has granted limited delegation of authority for private sector, third parties to design and certify PBN – or RNP – procedures. Perhaps we need some policy thinking about how best to accelerate the role of the private sector in procedures development with a higher oversight role for the public sector – for the FAA in this process.
Another policy we’ve not stepped up to is in the airborne infrastructure – aircraft avionics in particular – that make up the way the airspace works in a NextGen world. It might actually save the Federal government money to subsidize the equipage of aircraft in a way that expands the nation’s airspace capacity and reduces controller workload while increasing safety.
Airports face similar challenges. Many of America’s smaller airports of great value to the future of public mobility are closing – being sold off for condos and strip malls. Not so sure we need lots more strip malls in the country, but I’m not a real estate developer. One of the policy challenges is that the FAA support for local – say county – acquisition of privately owned airports for public use is dependent on airspace rules from the last century. For example, if your local airport has use terms set by your local county supervisors that prohibit straight-in approaches due to noise or other concerns, the FAA may not readily support the acquisition of a private airport for public use because of this constraint. In a NextGen world, geometric restrictions like that go away. You can design curved departures and approaches that are tailored to the local community considerations. We could never think that way until now, but the policy in practice has not caught up with the 21st century.
Fly NextGen: So what’s the next step? How can community airports be integrated into the nation’s public mobility infrastructure?
Bruce Holmes:Right now, there is a sort of brain block between the federal sector and the state and municipal level in terms of public policy for funding infrastructure at small airports for this fairly new purpose of public transportation to and from smaller airports. You have the AIP program in the FAA, but most of the funding goes to large airports.
If we viewed non-hub, smaller community airports as public transportation portals, we would have a more inclusive public policy on infrastructure investments. Today, we don’t have that. We don’t have a national air transportation policy, and we don’t have a mental model in the nation as a consequence in terms of legislation and public finance that says, “OK, well, this is infrastructure we care about and we’re going to invest in it because it adds to economic opportunity and quality of life in the same way that highways and bridges and big airports do.” That’s just missing. Part of the reason is that historically these small airports have been not for public transportation. They have been for very special-use transportation. In a NextGen world with more widespread on-demand air service to more local communities, this will change.
I believe that the transformation of air transportation will be local. All transformation has to have local roots in the sense of commissioners, mayors, council chairs, and public administrators who understand this story. It’s again back to this massive adult education that has to be carried on. I think mostly it’s a matter of time at this stage. Any innovation goes through a life cycle that take years to decades even to get off the ground, and this is going to be no different. I think we’ve started that lift-off, and we had a little bit of a touchdown, and we’ll get lifted off again. And I think it will grow — once it does begin to grow, the doubling rate will increase.
Using historical examples of lifecycles of other innovations, the doubling rate will increase pretty dramatically, eventually. It’s hard to say whether that’s five, or ten, or fifteen years away, but it’s a natural process … If you look at the way that innovations trickle out into the population, we will follow a well-worn path.
