AIA to Congress: NextGen investment is a ‘no-brainer’

The Aerospace Industry Association’s Dan Elwell testified before the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure this week (press release, full text PDF), and called on Congress to fund NextGen investments through tax incentives as well as the Airport Improvement Program. Referring to the potential of NextGen technology to improve fuel efficiency, Elwell said:

At a time when congress is actively engaged in promoting economic recovery instruments and policies to protect our planet from global warming, robust investment in a single enterprise that will foster both is what we call a “no brainer.”

Elwell then went on to issue some specific requests:

1. Economic stimulus package funding increases for the Airport Improvement Program should include flexible eligibility for NextGen investments both on and off airside property. Funds to build taxiways and runways will create jobs in local districts and provide more room for aircraft, but without new NextGen approaches, new ground tracking systems, and ADS-B devices, growth at our airports will be restricted. [..]
2. One year extension of existing legislation granting accelerated depreciation for the purchase of new, environmentally friendly aircraft and the addition of new language to provide the same benefit for the purchase of commercial aircraft.

Finally, Elwell clarified that his industry was not asking for direct government investment.

AIA and its members do not support handouts or bailouts. The only economic stimulus civil aviation needs in today’s economic crisis is growth made possible by the efficiencies of NextGen, and confidence in the industry that the commitment to implement NextGen is real and on a predictable schedule.

An interesting sidenote: The committee hearing was convened by chairman Jim Oberstar in order to promote economic stimulus initiatives for the construction and transportation sectors. In his opening remarks, Oberstar made it clear that his focus was on roads, bridges and rail infrastructure, not aviation.

Explainer: Clean air turbulence

A great column in Forbes magazine about what clean air turbulence is, why it happens, why it’s hard to avoid, and how meteorologists might soon be able to do a better job of predicting it. No specific mention of NextGen, though the author makes the point that one of the problems today is the low-resolution nature of aviation forecasts. Clearly, if the visionaries in the FAA weather group have their way, this should change within a couple of years.

CSC buys maker of ATC simulator software

Integration giant Computer Sciences Corp. has acquired Maryland-based Xavius Technology in order to raise its game in the field of air traffic control simulation (press release). Xavius, which released its first simulator in the late nineties as a standalone software product for the PC market, has since expanded into radar training, tower simulators, and ATM software. The move is notable given that CSC is at the forefront of NextGen traffic management initiatives — for instance, their TMA system is a key component of next month’s FAA demo at the Florida testbed facility.

How will the presidential election affect air travel?

A fine column from Joe Brancatelli, former editor of Frequent Flyer magazine and current contributor to Conde Nast Portfolio, on how our next president might shape the airline industry. Brancatelli mentions NextGen, but also examines topics ranging from reform at the TSA, to currency policy, to open skies agreements, to possible re-regulation. An interesting sidenote: his top guesses on who might be tapped to lead DOT are Rep. Jim Oberstar (Dem) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (GOP).

FAA’s Leverenz touts Alaska Airlines approach ‘saves’

FAA Acting Deputy Administrator Ruth Leverenz spoke to the International Aviation Womens’ Association on Friday, and portrayed NextGen as the next frontier in a long line of historical breakthroughs. (Transcript here.) Also, she specifically highlighted Alaska Airilnes’ participation in an RNP program at Palm Springs International.

We are focusing deployment of RNAV and Required Navigation Performance, RNP, around our most congested airports. One of our earliest adopters is Alaska Airlines. With RNP approach procedures at Palm Springs on the West Coasts, Alaska Airlines reported that 10 percent of their flights were classified as “saves” in the first quarter of this year. Those are flights that would have been otherwise diverted to alternate airports because of bad weather. A “save” translates directly to savings for the carrier — emissions, time, passenger convenience.

Partnerships with operators equipped to perform these procedures are yielding the biggest benefits from increases in operational efficiency and reductions in fuel use and emissions. We are also seeing benefits today from the introduction of Optimized Profile Descents that have shown fuel savings averaging about 50 to 60 gallons of fuel for the arrival portion of flights. It reduces as much as 1,200 pounds of carbon dioxide per arrival.

EXCLUSIVE: Embry-Riddle’s Christina Frederick talks to Fly NextGen about politics, next month’s big test, and why she’s nervous about a ‘huge FAA shakeup’

On November 18th, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University will host a demo of some key systems around ERAM (En Route Automation Modernization) and TMA (Traffic Management Advisor) at its NextGen test bed facility in Daytona Beach. It’s a high-profile moment for the University, which has been lobbying heavily for funds that will allow it to develop and implement new technologies across the ATC spectrum.

Embry-Riddle’s VP of Research, Dr. Christina Frederick-Recascino, spoke to Fly NextGen about the demo as well as a wide range of related NextGen topics, including her hopes and fears for a new administration in Washington.

To read the interview from the beginning, start here.

Selected quotes:

On Embry-Riddle’s focus: “What’s really important to think about is that NextGen is not just aviation. It’s aerospace technology, it’s engineering, it’s the impact on the traveler.” (Link)

On who’s invited to the November demonstration: “The type of people that we want at this demo are people from the FAA who need to see that these disparate systems coming from different companies can be married together and could be implemented, you know, across the country.” (Link)

Research priorities: “As global climate change emerges and storms get more severe, the integration of better weather prediction and better weather displays is something we’re very interested in.” (Link)

On the post-inauguration FAA: “You don’t want someone coming who knows absolutely nothing — that would, I think, be a real setback.” (Link)

Message to Washington: “Please don’t stop now, don’t take that money that was lined up for NextGen and say, gosh, it’s better spent somewhere else.” (Link)

NASA to fund radical thinking on the future of commercial flight

The aeronautics research arm of NASA has awarded $12.4 million in grants to six teams, who will develop advanced concepts for commercial aircraft that could enter service around 2035 (press release). The teams, which include industry giants like Northrop-Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, as well as researchers from MIT, Purdue, Georgia Tech and Tufts, will focus on three key areas: aircraft that could operate from small airports, subsonic airliners, and supersonic jets.

All concepts are expected to be dramatically cleaner, quieter, and more fuel efficient than today’s models. NASA’s website includes details for each project as well as highly imaginative artist renderings.

[Kudos to Graham Warwick from Aviation Week for spotting this story; his article includes reactions and analysis and can be found here.]

Presidential candidates’ views on FAA succession are vague, similar

The Aicraft Owners and PIlots Association (AOPA) asked the campaigns for both presidential candidates identical questions of interest to the GA community (link here). The last question was phrased as follows: “What specific qualifications will you look for when nominating an FAA administrator?”

John McCain: “The FAA is going to face some major challenges during the next administration—the toughest challenge will be getting the “next generation” air traffic control system on track. The country needs a modernized system if we are going to avoid gridlock in the air. If I am elected president, I will search for an administrator who will be a strong leader with the experience and management background needed to ensure that the FAA succeeds in modernizing the air traffic control system for the benefit for both commercial and general aviation.”

Barack Obama: “I will appoint a qualified FAA administrator who has an unwavering commitment to public service and will put the safety and security of the American people ahead of partisanship and ideology. I have been extremely concerned about reports of the FAA’s actions the past seven years, and I am committed to turning back some of the recent failures and creating an FAA that is responsive to public concerns, as well as concerns from aircraft users across the country.”

Taxiing SkyWest jet collides with truck at O’Hare; 3 injured

Three people were injured at Chicago’s O’Hare airport early Saturday when a city maintenance truck collided with a United Express CL-600 regional jet, operated by SkyWest Airlines. The plane was being piloted by two maintenance workers on a closed runway when the accident occurred; no passengers were on board. The truck driver was listed in critical condition — more details in this article.

FAA’s Victoria Cox: ‘We ain’t seen nothing yet’

FAA Senior Vice President for NextGen Victoria Cox has an editorial in the Fredericksburg (VA) Free Lance-Star newspaper.

The technology of NextGen is not our greatest challenge. Marshalling the support–including financial resources–necessary to build and implement NextGen is. Virtually everyone seems to agree that we need to do something to address the congestion and delay problems, but not everyone is on board when it comes to doing what is necessary to make NextGen happen.

But, as we all know, we can’t keep doing the same thing and expect different results. And if we think congestion and delays are bad now, as a popular song of the mid-1970s so aptly put it, we ain’t seen nothing yet.

Fredericksburg is about 50 miles south of Washington, so this appears to be an unusual way to target certain beltway insiders.
Oh — one hates to quibble about this sort of thing, but we remember the Bachman Turner Overdrive song as “You ain’t seen nothing yet” …

FAA adds 3 new carriers to cockpit safety trial

The FAA has announced it will partner with three additional airlines for its upcoming cockpit safety initative, which focuses on Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) and Aural Alerting technology. (FAA fact sheet). The newly added carriers are Atlas Air, CommutAir and Shuttle America, and the three will receive a combined total of $1.7 million in return for access to operational data. Last month, the FAA said it had reached agreements with US Airways, Southwest, SkyWest and Piedmont Airlines to take part in the same trial.

Domestic passenger traffic drops 3.5% in July

The U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics released its most current monthly data on passenger traffic today, and the picture is fairly grim. Total July traffic (year-over-year) declined 2.9%, but that number is a bit misleading because the international portion was up 1.3%. Looking only at the domestic passenger count, traffic was down 3.5%. (The complete BTS press release is here.) Compared to one year ago, only US Airways and Airtran added capacity; JetBlue was basically flat, and Northwest and SkyWest were down sharply.

Sensis nabs $131 million contract to install runway lights

It’s been a good month so far for Sensis. The East Syracuse (NY)-based tech integrator just landed an FAA contract to install runway status lights at 22 U.S. airports (press releases here and here). The initial job is priced at $131 million; two one-year options could extend that amount to $215 million. Last week, Sensis announced a deal to install a surface surveillance system in Perth, Australia (our post here).

Earnings report: Q3 fuel costs hit airlines hard

Three of the nation’s largest air carriers reported stiff underlying quarterly losses on Thursday, with American Airlines parent AMR reaching profitability only through the sale of financial firm American Beacon Advisors. (Stories here and here.)

AMR said its third-quarter net profit amounted to $45 million, or 17 cents per share. [..]
Excluding the sale of American Beacon Advisors and other items, AMR said it lost $360 million, or $1.39 per share, compared with forecasts for a loss of $1.36 per share, according to Reuters Estimates. [..]
The company reported revenue of $6.4 billion, an 8 percent gain over the year-ago period.

Delta, which is buying Northwest Airlines Corp (NWA.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) to form the world’s largest airline by traffic, reported a quarterly net loss of $50 million, or 13 cents per share. [..]
Delta increased operating revenue 9 percent to $5.7 billion, even though it reduced its flying capacity in the quarter, helped by strong trans-Atlantic business, higher fares and more fees. But the airline’s operating costs increased $814 million, or 17 percent, almost entirely due to higher fuel.

Continental Airlines Inc. said Thursday it swung to a $236 million loss in the third quarter from a year-ago profit as it battled high fuel costs and weather disruptions at its big Houston hub.
Revenue rose nearly 9 percent to $4.16 billion, beating analysts’ $4.11 billion forecast. [..]
Hurricane Ike, which shut down Houston airports for more than two days last month, cost the airline about $50 million in operating profit. And the carrier had to contend with a 68 percent spike in fuel costs to $1.5 billion during the quarter, as crude prices flirted with $150 a barrel mark in July.

All players emphasized continuing cuts in capacity. Meanwhile, it’s noteworthy that operating revenue is up 8 to 9 percent across the board — looks like those higher fares and fees are having an impact.

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UPDATE:  Southwest also announced a loss for Q3, though in this case underlying operations had been profitable. In a bit of a twist, the hit came from a big *drop* in oil prices. Details from AP:

 

Southwest lost $120 million in the third quarter due to $247 million in charges, mostly due to writing down fuel-hedging contracts that are less valuable now that oil prices have plunged more than half since July.
Without the write-down and other charges, Southwest said it earned an operating profit of $69 million. [..] Revenue rose 11.7 percent to $2.89 billion, beating analysts’ forecast of $2.83 billion.
Southwest has been more successful than any other airline at hedging against high oil prices. It buys options to lock in fuel at set prices, a strategy that has saved it several billion dollars this decade.
But accounting rules require Southwest to constantly update the potential value of some of those contracts, and their value tumbled as oil prices fell.

Believe it or not, this was Southwest’s first quarterly loss in 17 years.

FAA to establish foothold in India

While it’s not exactly NextGen, the Times of India had an interesting item about the FAA’s efforts to establish closer ties with the aviation community in India. At this week’s India Aviation conference and expo in Hyderabad, acting Administrator Robert Sturgell announced that the agency will be dispatching a permanent representative to India for the first time.

“Through partnerships in these area we want to learn from each other. Safety and efficiency solutions will benefit every one,” [Sturgell] said.

Sturgell said as countries were developing new aviation systems, there was a need to ensure that they are harmonized. He pointed out that the FAA had already set up working groups to address safety and efficiency issues.

“You face many challenges including infrastructure challenges but you are not alone. Others are also facing the same challenges,” he said while referring to the growth of Indian civil aviation over the last seven decades.

Explainer: ACARS and its future

Among the many legacy networks that NextGen initiatives will presumably replace, the Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) stands out as especially anachronistic in a wifi- and WWAN-enabled world. This system, which uses 100- to 200- character “telex-style” messages for 2-way data transmission between commercial aircraft and airline operations centers, is slow, expensive, and poorly suited for data-intensive workflows. This well-written article from Overhaul & Maintenance magazine explores the options for replacing ACARS; if you’re interested in learning more about the system, it’s also worth taking a quick look at this clear and comprehensive Wikipedia entry.

Gloomy outlook for defense biz; contractors looking to IT, training, logistics

Monday’s Washington Post provides some good context around the economic conditions faced by large government contractors. The article’s subhead — “After Eight Boom Years for Spending on Military Equipment, Contractors Expect a Slowdown” — points to looming uncertainty in the defense sector, but also outlines alternative strategies being pursued by Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and others:

With nearly 60 percent of its $42 billion in annual sales coming from the Defense Department, Lockheed Martin is pursuing other areas of business to compensate for any slowdown in defense spending. For the past eight years, the Bethesda company has tried to expand its information technology services business. Already, it expects double-digit sales growth in that unit this year compared with last year. [..]
Bob Trice, senior vice president of Lockheed’s business development unit, said the defense industry is likely to see fewer new weapons programs. For Lockheed, “we’re already laser-focused on [information technology] and we will continue to be and we’ll do the same with logistics and maintenance.”

Raytheon of Waltham, Mass., has begun to diversify by making several acquisitions to bolster its cyber-security capabilities. It also has landed two lucrative training deals: One is a contract worth as much as $11 billion with Falls Church-based CSC and General Dynamics to do training for the Army; another is a 10-year contract to provide training support to the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic controllers for $437 million.

One mildly ironic sidenote: earlier this year, the Post ran this article entitled “Little Trace of Slowdown for Defense Contractors.”

Flight rerouting called ‘reckless’

The re-routing of four flights over North Carolina and Georgia is being investigated due to union allegations that an FAA manager ordered the move in violation of federal rules. The incident, which occurred at Jacksonville Center late last week, was first made public by NATCA (press release here) and later picked up by the AP. Union reps say the aircraft — a Delta Airlines B757, a Virgin Atlantic B747 and two Southwest Airlines B737s — were ordered to fly out of their way so that a trainee could demonstrate his capabilities during a so-called “skills check.” An FAA spokeswoman says the agency is looking into the incident.

FAA’s troubled flight-plan system: an IT perspective

The corporate IT magazine ‘Baseline’ has a sprawling, somewhat uneven, but nonetheless fascinating article related to the spectacular August 26th system failure of the National Airspace Data Interchange Network (NADIN) site in Atlanta. One interesting tidbit: the existing mainframe hardware — in use continuously since 1988 — was actually first manufactured in the 1960s and later upgraded in 1981.
There’s also a fairly technical discussion about security, which — while mostly over our head — is relevant given that the article characterizes the “corrupt file” that apparently caused the August failure as a virus.

One step at a time: Phase 2 of TFMS upgrade completed

It’s a baby step, but a step nonetheless. In this press release from Computer Sciences Corp., the tech giant reports it has completed an upgrade of the FAA’s Traffic Flow Management System. CSC says the system “integrates real-time weather and flight data from multiple sources, provides centralized communications, enhanced security, initial relational database constructs and centralized system management.” We’d be interested to know just how advanced these “initial” constructs are.

So what is TFMS? In a nutshell, the system allows controllers to quickly initiate “reroute scenarios” based on weather and other disruptions to normal traffic flow, and then communicate key instructions to airlines.

Some background: The contract included three base years and four two-year options with an estimated total value of $589 million. CSC is among the top 10 tech contractors serving the U.S. government; its total revenue for the 12 months ending July 2008 was $17 billion.