NextGen ATC vs China, Al Queda, and Vinny and the Housewives of New Jersey

The United States has the world's most advanced and safest air navigation system. The problem with a mature successful system is for the vendors; while there's a minor upgrade every few years, the Industry really doesn't get to sell any more major new systems.

Unless they get some magic beans that will change everything. What would be an attractive list of sizzle attributes for marketing's bullet list? Reduce delays. Shorten flights. Improve the carbon footprint. (better stop there).

So they design a new system, call it NextGen ATC, and the vendors design a very, very expensive system. These magic beans are so expensive that the country will have to scrap the existing, world's-best legacy, outdated system completely and put all our future eggs in the vendor's NextGen basket. Why is the vendor's system so expensive? Where does the money go? To the Vendors, silly.

What are the vendors selling? Are they going to develop a startling new technology for their share of the public treasure? No, they're going to misappropriate leverage the GPS network. Let me say this another way: they're going to sell the public a system based on the free, existing GPS network that the public has already paid for. Wow, these guys went to some college.

GPS is the basis of Industry's NextGen bundle, because it provides a capability that Industry doesn't have to pay for or maintain. It's free; it's ubiquitious.

Unintended Consequences of Free and Ubiquitious

The problem with free and ubiquitious is that people start using it for creative secondary reasons, and those applications can bring unintended consequences to other participants.

A New York financier saw an arbitrage opportunity and invested in what he thought was an undervalued frequency spectrum. He formed a company, LightSquared (e=mc²), bought the spectrum at a bargain (from the public, btw) and attempted to exploit the space by using the spectrum for wide scale, metropolitan WiFi (the internet - another free ubiquitious thingy). (LightSquared's founder Philip Falcone is the 540th richest person in the world, the 188th richest in the United States, and is apparently too young to have read Bonfire of the Vanities.)

Unfortunately, LightSquared's use of their spectrum caused problems for everybody's GPS.
Without getting too technical, GPS uses a satellite way up high to send a teeny weeny faint radio signal to your WalMart GPS which was produced on razor-thin margins. In other words, GPS requires a cheap-as-possible device to receive and process a very faint signal. For a long time it worked, because nobody was using the adjacent spectrum.

LightSquared wanted to use the adjacent spectrum and place fairly relatively low-power transmitters all around cities (with airports) to provide MetroWiFi. Their low power tranmitters put out a much stronger signal than the far-away satellites.

LightSquared wasn't just threatening RadioShack; LightSquared was threatening everybody's use of the free/ubiquitious GPS. In particular, LightSquared pissed off the John Deere tractor company, which upsells tractors with GPS navigation, and so their Senator became very concerned about GPS integrity.

There's nothing wrong with LightSquared's technical approach. The problem is that billions of existing GPS receivers aren't shielded for interference, and aren't built to identify the legitimate satellite signal. LightSquared unintentionally exposed an essential, flawed assumption in relying on GPS.

LightSquared lost because the Homeland Security Military Industrial Complex (HSMIC) commissioned studies and wrote papers that said, Establishing low-power transmitters in LightSquared's spectrum will disable all GPS air navigation for that region. Wow. wow Wow wow Wow. wow.

We have no love for LightSquared or Falcone, who was attempting to become rich by exploiting an undervalued national asset, which is a bit like stealing from your children. It is intriguing that the HSMIC would publicly confirm that a series of low-power transmitters could disable GPS air navigation just when we're about to throw away the robust, decentralized legacy outdated system in favor of a single-point-of-failure, easily jammable pure-play GPS NextGen system.

I mean, Holy Asymmetric Warfare, Batman! Haven't we recently seen American aviation grounded by asymmetric techniques? Are we really about to decommission the existing robust, decentralized system and replace it with something that can be disabled with a few low-powered transmitters?

The Asymmetric Scenario

Here's the script: a non-state, religious-based network that's upset because we're occupying their 'stan places electronic transmitters in ten US metroplexes. The transmitters are innocuous; they look like laptop power supplies. They're programmed to turn on and off in a consistent, intermittent pattern during the day; each city's network will go active two days a month. Monday it's Newark; Tuesday it's Dallas; Wednesday is LosAngeles; Thursday is Chicago; Friday is Atlanta. Week two is Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, Houston, Seattle. Get the flick? They plug these devices in on the first of the month and walk away; they're in storage units, rental houses, etc. They've just shut down the domestic GPS aviation system, because the uncertainty is unacceptable.

To be fair, radio-based air navigation has always been subject to intentional, adversarial interference (MIJI). It's nothing new. The difference is that existing systems can be overcome by high-powered transmitters and those are relatively easy to find and deal with. The faint GPS signals can be thwarted by a few low-power transmitters that are very hard to find when deployed as a noisy network.

• The early concern about switching to NextGen is: China can shoot down satellites, and NextGen requires satellites.
  
• The asymmetric concern about NextGen is: a very low cost, hard to track, easily deployable grid of low-powered transmitters will render GPS unusable to aviation, and NextGen requires GPS.

I find the second issue (asymmetric vulnerability) more concerning than the first (China). But now it seems that the greatest risk of all is a guy named Vinny and the housewives of New Jersey, and the many people like them.

NextGen ATC vs Vinny & the Housewives of N.J.

Here's a story. The facts are fudged but there's truth in it; there are links to the official reports below. There's a guy named Vinny who lives in Fort Lee, New Jersey with his wife. Vinny's girlfiend lives in Passaic, which is far enough away that they're not likely to see each other in church, but close enough that he can get over there occasionally.

Vinny thinks the wife suspects something. She watches Housewives of New Jersey, which is kind of an aspirational drama for her. Vinny knows The Wife could slip a GPS tracker into his car and he'd never know it, so he seeks advice from his cousin Joey.

Joey works for a delivery company where they put GPS trackers in every vehicle to optimize efficiency - which means, keeping the guys from napping. His cousin went to Google and typed in, GPS blocker jammer and found a solution. Now on rough days Joey turns on the jammer gizmo, drives to a park and takes a nap. Fuggedaboudit.

Vinny does the same thing. He buys a personal GPS jammer and turns it on before he sneaks over to Passaic for an assignation. Unfortunately, when he drives by Newark Liberty Airport on the Turnpike, his GPS jammer blocks the GPS signal. Two pilots report the outage and it's a major snafu. The technicians come out but now everything's working fine because Vinny has moved on. At the airport people try to figure out what happened over coffee and bagels; it's hard to troubleshoot a phantom event. Fuggedaboudit.



About ninety minutes later, the pilots are reporting GPS problems again. Guess what? Vinny is going home to Fort Lee. The technicians scurry all around and chaos reigns again, but a while later everything seems fine.

Both Fox News and The Economist carried this story. The geeks are all over this; WIRED magazine's article was titled, The $30 GPS Jammer that could paralyze US Cities, and they suggest there's a lot more involved than aviation, because a lot of embedded systems use the GPS time-stamp as an essential component.

The Newark Airport has never been able to commission their public-private-partnership (PPP) Honeywell GPS ground-based augmentation system (GBAS) in spite of their great desire to do so, because between deliverymen and philandering spouses like Vinny, there's a lot of people on New Jersey highways with GPS jammers.

There is, remarkably, a public version of the official report online which details the profusion of GPS jamming devices along the New Jersey Turnpike. The report documents multiple days with multiple GPS jamming events. Vinny is Legion.

Back to Vinny. We don't know if Mrs. Vinny ever got a GPS tracker, all we know is that Vinny is a weasel scoundrel who was afraid of being discovered. He was afraid she could be a wannabe Housewife of New Jersey and buy a GPS tracker, so Vinny invested in some electronic countermeasures (ECM). (Probably, next season, the Housewives will deploy drones.)

Vinny's compromise of the Newark airport was driven by his desire to not get caught in adultery. That is a rational, non-trivial, universal motivation.

Any engineering system faces forces that would work against it. Bridges, for instance, must deal with wind and tides. If NextGen has to contend with nervous adulterers for operational reliability, it is doomed from the start. And I think that's an argument that most Congressmen could relate to.


China? Fuggedaboudit. Think about Vinny and the recent LightSquared documentation, and the wisdom of replacing the legacy system with a GPS system.

As a Matter of Fact: 2014 New Jersey Superbowl

This was the cover of the NY Post during the week:



As a matter of fact, I'd like to point out that the 2014 Superbowl will be played in New Jersey, at a venue called the New Jersey Meadowlands.

Also, just for the record, the Statue of Liberty, glommed as a symbol of Gotham, is placed in New Jersey. It is owned by New York City, but it is situated in New Jersey. You'll notice then when you buy a ticket into EWR, you're flying into the Newark-Liberty airport.

I'm just saying. Facts are stubborn things.

Why are airport / airline delays the same, year after year?

Why are airline / airport delays the same, year after year? Why don't the airlines change their schedules and prevent these delays? Because it's profitable. The airlines and airports have calculated that it's in their interest to perpetuate the current system.

Overcrowded airports are the classic "Tragedy of the Commons" problem. When a common resource is overused, the over-user (the airline) profits, and the costs are transferred to the community (the passengers).

When an airline overschedules an airport with more paying passengers, they make more money from ticket sales; the costs of the overscheduling - the tremendous amount of time and inefficiency - is carried by the passengers, not the airline. Although the chipper flight attendant may say that they're sorry about the delay, in fact the airline intentionally schedules these situations year after year.

Local Collaborators

Local government, in some places the Port Authority and in others the Airport Authority, profits from overcrowded airports. Each one of those passengers pays an airport tax on their ticket. Every time they buy an overpriced pizza in the terminal, the airport gets a slice of it.

Nothing is more profitable for an airport than an overscheduled hub operation. Think about a meeting at generic Port Authority, when MegaAir comes in and proposes to route an additional 15,000 people through their terminal everyday.
Port Auth: What does the Port Authority get out of this?
Mega Air: Well, increased landing fees per plane, and the $5 airport use tax for each person that lands, and each person that departs.
Port Auth: We're getting that $5 airport tax already.
Mega Air: But now we're going to route 15,000 connections — people in Toledo, who want to be in Tampa — through your airport. You'll get $5 when they come in, and $5 when they go out.
Port Auth: What's the downside?
Mega Air: Well, if there's thunderstorms or snow, the terminal's going to get very crowded when our connecting schedule goes crazy. It happens every time.
Port Auth: But we'd still get $10 apiece from 15,000 people a day, none of whom would ordinarily be here?
Mega Air: That's right.
Port Auth: Works for me. Let's see, $10 times 15K x 365. That's $55 million a year. Yeah, that works.

Port Authorities start off as a government agency, but they develop their own agendas and grow into a monster. In the NY metro area, the Port Authority of NY and NJ was given the bridges and airports to minimize inter-city and inter-state conflict. The Port Authority has become an autonomous government regime, accountable to nobody but themselves. They're a government that's not accountable to the voters. They're a corporation that acts in its own self-interest, just like any other.

In March 2010, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey will close Runway 13R-31L at Kennedy. This one project (of many) is a $376 million dollar project. That $376,000,000 is mostly federal money that the Port Authority gets to distribute to contractors, suppliers, and vendors. There's a lot of concrete companies and union construction jobs in a $376 million project, and a lot of patronage and influence even when everything's legit.

What a shell game. The Feds put up 90% of the $376M. The Port Authority distributes it and builds influence and power, and then they tell the Feds to piss off. Bada bing, bada boom.

The Port Authority of NY-NJ is bigger than the governor of either state. They're accountable to nobody. They hire lobbying firms to influence Legislatures and Elections. They're a democratic nightmare, a big budget and a powerful organization with no accountability and no oversight. They have their own think tank. The Port Authority has a power base that no politician dares to challenge. By the way, guess who owned the World Trade Center?

One out of six (16%) of Port Authority employees take home more than $100,000 per year. They do this through $8 ticket fees and $8 bridge tolls, some of which is paid by people who make $8 an hour.

The Port Authority profits from the over-scheduling of LGA, EWR, and JFK, and they'll defend their status quo cash-cow against any reform. The Port Authority does not operate those airports for the good of the New York metro population or economy; they operate those airports for the good of the Port Authority. (Rational self-interest, for all you Ayn Rand fans out there.)

Same as it Ever Was, Same as it Ever Was

Last year the Federal Aviation Administration announced that it intended to reintroduce flight caps based on runway capacity at Kennedy airport. One year ago today, Aug. 5, 2008, the Port Authority announced that it would fight the Federal flight restrictions as an unwelcome intrusion. The Port Authority estimated that the caps would cost it $200 Million a year in lost passenger ticket fees alone. (That's the basis of my generic PortAuthority/MegaAir discussion above).


The Port Authority told the airlines that any flight that participated in the slots system might land, but they couldn't pull into the Port Authority's terminal; they'd have to taxi back out and fly away. That's power. A local authority tells the airlines that if they cooperate with FAA, they'll be locked out of their terminals. Once that threat was made, all the airlines publicly supported the Port Authority's position.



New York City's Mayor Bloomberg bucked the Port Authority and backed the FAA's proposal.

The FAA said that if the Port Authority persisted, they'd risk losing federal money.


NY Senator Chuck Schumer told the FAA that they wouldn't get any Senate approvals for personnel or budgets until the issue was resolved. Who blinked? The Feds blinked. The Port Authority won (as the house always does). The airline schedule, and airport delays, continue unabated.

In a final show of chutzpah, the Port Authority published its own list of steps to reduce delays — no flight caps, no new runways, but lots of money for the Port Authority for more taxiways and technology.

Chuck Schumer, who does have a pretty good handle on air traffic staffing (he gets the difference between a trainee and a controller), continues to berate the FAA for delays in the New York area airports. That's incongruous with his actions last year to prevent flight caps based on runway capacity.

Want to know why we have the same delays year after year? Because the Airlines and the Airports find it profitable and in their interest.

A New York NextGen Metaphor

skimmers - click for main point

When spokesmen, rhetoricians and salesmen announce – hey, there’s a new technology that's going to set us free, those Luddites infatuated with the status quo are just trying to keep their own good thing going, this is just featherbedding by their Union – well, the public doesn’t know which experts to listen to. It comes down to competing stories, because the public isn't qualified to judge on technical grounds. Is it Who do you find believable, or is it Who's told you the story that you most want to believe?

One of the things that I've learned is that when change is profitable, change will have prophets. When there's no industry profit in maintaining the status quo, then there'll be no advocates for the status quo. When they say "we need to replace the whole system", look for who profits from the change and then consider their spokesmen anew.

You’ll remember that we said that airplanes are a lot like cars when they’re on runways (which are roads for airplanes). When airplanes are landing and taking off, they’re two-dimensional. In aviation, runways are the constraints.

A New York State of Mind

When we talk about New York airports, we're really talking about Newark, LaGuardia, and Kennedy. And why is that? Because they're all owned by the same corporation, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ.gov). Remember that - there's a corporation that owns all three airports. In fact, if you go to their website, you'll see this cute little logo on the right. If you click on that logo, you'll see PANYNJ's webpage titled, "Next Gen Now!"

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Once Upon a Time...

Here’s a little story that may explain why NextGen won’t solve the problem of New York's airport congestion.

Let’s say you’ve got a city – why, let’s call it Gotham. You can only drive in or out of the city via three bridges – the GWB to the west, the VNB to the south, and the TNB to the east. (Work with me here.) Every day, 5.8 million people want to drive across those three bridges, in and out of the city. They do this in cars, vans, buses, and trucks. There is no control over who can come in, where they come in, when they leave - it's completely up for grabs.


Almost six million people drive into the city in the morning. At 4:00 am, the bridge system is happy, peaceful, and underused. At 5:00 am, the system is operating effectively – no delays. At 7:30 am, traffic volume exceeds the capacity of the bridges. The highways (which have more lanes than the bridges they feed) start backing up. Delays. Congestion. Frustration.

The Gotham Bridge Authority (GBA) is not uncaring. They don’t want to see delays. They experimented with off-peak pricing, making the bridges free during off-peak hours and collecting double fares during busy hours, but that seemed to have perverse and unintended effects.

They implemented one-way tolls, so that drivers paid a double fee in one direction and no fee in the other - this made things better, but there was still congestion. They implemented EZ-OnePass, but when the demand grew high, the bridges were still clogged.



A think-tank visionary comes along and says, “We’re going to equip each vehicle with a CB-radio. Armed with this technology, drivers will be able to communicate with each other, learn about delays, and reroute themselves. The Market can solve this problem”.

A partnership executive comes along and says “We’re going to put a GPS in each vehicle so they can reroute themselves efficiently, and in fact these fancy GPS units will receive real-time traffic reports so drivers can make informed choices.”

Reporters covering their press conference were wondering who Adam Smith was; the two advocates talked about him and his invisible hand a lot, but he never appeared. Probably a wonk consultant.

The public found the proposal persuasive. Everytime traffic backed up, they used their cellphones to call Chuck Schumer. Senator Schumer ranted and raged about how Gotham deserved only the best. And so it came to be - everybody had to buy a GPS and a CB radio for their car. The local electronics industry was booming.

The Moment of Truth

And yet remarkably, on a Friday afternoon at 5:30, you still can’t drive across the GWB, TNG, or VNB without significant delays. If it’s snowing: Fuhgeddaboudit.

Does any New Yorker believe that if every driver had a CB and a GPS, that traffic congestion over the George Washington Bridge, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, and the Throg Neck Bridge would go away? Does anybody believe it? Because that's the pitch they're hoping you'll believe about airplanes.

Those three bridges in our story are just like the runways at JFK, EWR, and LGA. They’re the constraints. All the cars have to pass through the bridges. All the planes have to go through those runways. All the CB radios, TomTom GPS's, datalinks and ADS-Bs aren’t going to significantly change that reality. NextGen will do nothing to resolve airline congestion at Kennedy, Newark, and LaGuardia.

But they'd like to sell you some gizmo's if you're buying.

What Happened?

New Yorkers clamored for an investigation; they'd been told that the technology and Adam Smith would solve their problems. They'd all bought CB's and fancy GPSs, and in fact some people who couldn't afford them had stopped driving and rode the bus. Why was there no significant benefit?

The Post discovered that one advocate was paid by a series of grants from the Citizens Band Advocacy Group, a market-based think tank funded by the manufacturers of CB radios. The Daily News reported that the other advocate was funded by the TomTom Group, a future-focused think tank financed by a series of grants from the GPS industry. The Times reported that they both had grants from the Gotham Bridge Authority, who it seems had a vested interest in their monopoly over access to Gotham.

If you stood in the toll plaza during rush hour and spoke with a commuter, sitting in stopped traffic with his CB and GPS, and asked him who was at fault, you'd probably hear that the villian was a consultant named Adam Smith, who'd gone into hiding and disappeared. Nobody could find him. There wasn't any sign of him or his invisible hand.

And they all lived, happily ever after...