CONTACT:  David Gillies, Rep. Costello’s office

COSTELLO WELCOMES DR. KARLIN TONNER AS HEAD OF JPDO

WASHINGTON – U.S. Congressman Jerry Costello (D-IL), Chairman of the House Aviation Subcommittee, issued the following statement today regarding the announcement by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that Dr. Karlin Tonner has been appointed Director of the Joint Planning and Development Office (JPDO).  JPDO is responsible for coordinating the development and implementation of the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen).

“I welcome Dr. Tonner to this critical position and look forward to working with her.  JPDO’s mission is as important as any currently before the aviation community, and I remain concerned that it is not structured in a way that gives the Director the level of authority and access needed to be effective.  I will continue to evaluate this issue as we move ahead.  Ensuring the necessary inter-agency cooperation that NextGen requires is a very complicated managerial task and we need to get it right.  Secretary LaHood and Administrator Babbitt understand this, and I believe Dr. Tonner’s extensive experience at NASA will be very helpful.”

The event is called “Beyond SOA and Cloud: Next Generation Information Exchange in High Consequence Environments”, and is hosted by the DC chapter of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association.

JPDO is collaborating with the event organizers and has contributed a case study focusing on NextGen.  Meanwhile, speakers will include Michael T. Jones (Google’s Chief Technology Advocate) as well as a number of leaders from the world of government IT (list here).

• FY11 Budget Guidance submitted to OST/OMB on February 20
• The Environmental Management System R&D initiated in March
• Roll-Out Plan for 2012 implementation of Net-Centric Information Sharing Capability released on March 12
• ATM Weather Integration Plan released on April 22
• NextGen Integrated Work Plan (IWP) agency gap analysis completed in April
• Phase 2 Aviation Safety Information Analysis and Sharing (ASIAS) ConOps endorsed by Board members at the JPDO Board Meeting on May 5
• Integrated Surveillance ConOps delivered on May 7

The original presentation is here.

Some quotes:

We need to make more progress with the net-centric operations piece. The aviation information-sharing infrastructure that underpins this is just critical. We’ve made frustratingly slow progress in that area, but I think we’re poised to have that change fairly dramatically.

There’s been criticism in the past that the JPDO has created these incredibly complex plans that are not accessible to people. I think, first of all, to criticize the complexity is relatively naïve, because this is an incredibly complex project.

We have an expression in JPDO — we say that agencies are playing budget chicken. So the FAA will say, “Well, we don’t really have a requirement for that, so we’re not going to pay for it, but if DoD will pay for it, we’ll use it.” And DoD will say, “Well, we don’t really need it – actually, it looks to us like you need it.”

To read the entire interview, click here.

There’s so much to explore, one hardly knows where to begin, but one thing that caught our eye was a list of “19 objectives” that a new airspace system should fulfill:

• Retain role as world leader in aviation
• Reduce costs of aviation
• Enable services tailored to traveler and shipper needs
• Encourage performance-based, harmonized global standards for U.S. products and services
• Maintain aviation’s record as safest mode of transportation
• Improve level of safety of U.S. air transportation system
• Increase level of safety of worldwide air transportation system
• Provide for common defense while minimizing civilian constraints
• Coordinate a national response to threats
• Ensure global access to civilian airspace
• Satisfy future growth in demand and operational diversity
• Reduce transit time and increase predictability
• Minimize impact of weather and other disruptions
• Reduce noise, emissions, and fuel consumption
• Balance aviation’s environmental impacts with other societal objectives
• Mitigate new and varied threats
• Ensure security efficiently serves demand
• Tailor strategies to threats, balancing costs and privacy issues
• Ensure traveler and shipper confidence in system security

We’re not sure we’ve seen the goals of NextGen summarized quite in this way before. Seems like it could be a compelling counterweight to the sometimes simplistic focus on ADS-B.

(Thanks to our friends at the JPDO for the heads-up about the site.!)

I have a lot of respect for Jane Garvey and Ken Meade, but it is clear they want to define NextGen in conventional terms – in terms of today’s system. NextGen is a transformation – just like the internet was a transformation in the way we communicate and interact. While we can describe the modernized physical systems that will form the backbone of NextGen, the most interesting part is the change in roles and relationships among the participants in the air transportation system. That cannot be fully determined and described in advance – just like it would have been impossible to describe how the internet would be used in advance. NextGen is not just hardware and software systems, it is the people and the relationships, and it is the evolution that will occur. The NextGen Concept of Operations describes how this may work in the future, but it is a target to evolve toward and adjust, not a deterministic end-state. And while we may need a better “elevator” speech to describe the vision, what we really need as we transition to a new administration is leadership that can manage in this new model.

special emphasis on preserving and improving America’s general aviation airports [and] increasing all-weather access to those airports

The release goes on to link the AOPA’s goals to statements from the JPDO about airport preservation:

Boyer noted that the Joint Planning and Development Office, which is leading efforts to implement the next generation air traffic control system, has identified the need to preserve the nation’s airport system and called on the FAA to do all it can to help the preservation effort.

“The FAA must build on this visionary work and focus resources on developing plans, policies, and budgets that not only preserve the airports that we have today, but also ensure their future through infrastructure investments.”

Boyer’s letter comes as the AOPA lobbies for changes to the current FAA Flight Plan, an annual document laying out the agencies road map for the next five years.

[Kudos to Aero-news.net for their coverage.]