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 These magic beans are so expensive that the country will have to scrap the existing, world's-best legacy, outdated system completely and put all our future eggs in the vendor's NextGen basket.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.

Brinksmanship, Shutdown, Kick-the-Can: Games True Believers Play

In July, the intractable minority (using Rep. Mica as an avatar) shutdown the FAA in a fit of brinksmanship over their desire to include new union-busting legislation on behalf of Delta Airlines. Although press releases claimed that 70,000 people were idled, the reality is that 4000 government employees were out of work, and some number of construction people were also out of work; the 70K number is an exaggeration based on multiplier-ripple effects, a type of math generally used only to justify public investment in sports stadiums.

Shutting down a government agency is a spike-the-ball moment for the True Believers, but in July the news was almost lost in the noise about the debt limit. The Republican House and the Administration managed to get a 90-day extension signed, which expires Sept.16.

Today, of course, is Sept. 15.

The House passed legislation that would reauthorize the agency all the way through January. They timed the signing so that the bill would get to the Senate after the Upper Chamber began working on a FEMA bill for the recent East Coast disasters.

Once again, the House Republicans have designed a situation in which they've delivered last-minute legislation to avoid an unacceptable outcome, without any time for discussion, negotiation, or process. If the Senate doesn't pass the bill -- well, it's not the Republican's fault that Harry Reid can't keep his house in order.

The great perverse genius of Boehner's plan (or rather, the Koch Brothers' strategy presented by the Boehner avatar) is that at most, they'll kick the can down the road for a few months - even when/if the Senate and President cave, in January we get to play Shutdown all over again. It's the game that keeps on giving.

Even if the Senate does get to consider the 120-day authorization, Senator Tom Coburn (R) intends to block any action until funding for bike trails is removed. Boehner shouldn't have all the fun(ds). If the Senate does cut the bike trails, they've changed the legislation - which means the House needs to approve it before it's valid.

Meanwhile, if you were was furloughed for a month in July - or even worse, an Inspector who was furloughed and continued working and paying their own travel expenses - you've got to be concerned. You're probably not thinking about NextGen, you're probably thinking about your NextCheck.




I really do think that the House Republicans represent the intractable minority of True Believers described in this month's Atlantic article. Here's a link to the original academic paper, Social Consensus through the influence of committed minorities. by J. Xie, S. Sreenivasan , G. Korniss, W. Zhang, C. Lim, and B. K. Szymanski.

One shutdown, or one mishmash, you might attribute to chaos. This is an ongoing series of shutdowns, and it might be time to connect the dots and recognize the pattern. This is a picture of today's True Believers during the Government Shutdown of 1995.

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A Countdown of Sorts

Chaos and NextGen: Panama Canal, Train Tunnels, Concrete vs Satellites

There's a gross over-simplification of chaos theory that goes: a butterfly flaps its wings in Africa, the monsoons run late in India, and we get tornadoes in Joplin.

We assume that the butterflies are benign, just like the birds are.



The National Gateway railroad project shows similar inter-dependencies and conditional sensitivity, and to me it carries interesting points about the NextGen aviation proposal and project management.

The Panama Canal is a money-maker. As shipping between Asia/China and the United States has increased, the number of ships trying to move materiel to the US East Coast has exceeded the capacity of the Panama Canal (which is fixed in terms of ship size, ships per hour, etc). Demand exceeds supply, costs go up, schedules slip, China looks for another path and starts sending more and more ships to the West Coast.

As the shipping business and the money moved away from the Panama Canal and toward West Coast docks and transcontinental train lines, the Canal people said 'Wait we want that money! We're going to widen the Canal, so really big ships can come through.'

When the train people found out that the Canal people were going lateral, they looked at their capability to handle the new volume and realized that the train structure can't handle it. The railroad solution was to go vertical and run double-height trains on the legacy tracks, doubling the railroad capacity.



But wait; the railroads have a problem. It's easy to run double-height trains in the open air, but it's impossible to run double-height trains through some of the oldest legacy tunnels, which were built in difficult situations to single-height train specs.

The railroads have embarked on a program to make their tunnels taller. Sometimes they raise the roof, sometimes they lower the floor. It's a huge effort called the National Gateway.

 

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This summer in Pittsburgh's Southside Works, the "tunnel park" shown in the photo above (where the CSX train tunnel runs under the grass) will be excavated, raised, and rebuilt, as explained by the Post-Gazette's most excellent Larry Walsh:

The Panama Canal is nearly 2,200 miles from Pittsburgh, but ripples from a $5.25 billion canal expansion will be felt here... when construction crews are expected to excavate the grassy strip in SouthSide Works known as Tunnel Park. There's a railroad tunnel down there, and CSX Transportation wants to raise the roof on it.

They hope to finish the work by 2015, when bigger ships that will be able to use the expanded Panama Canal will start plying East Coast ports, including Philadelphia, generating more demand for trains to move goods in the East and Midwest.

 

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I found another unexpected impact of the Panama Canal project last week when I was riding the bicycle trail from Confluence to Rockwood, near a place called Pinkerton PA. Let's look at the Pinkerton Horn, and the train tracks and tunnels that run through the mountain there.


This map shows the curve of the Cassellman River, which gives the Pinkerton Horn its shape, and the path of the original train line and tunnel:



This map shows the location of the current CSX train tracks and tunnel, which allowed the railroad to abandon the old tracks and problematic tunnel.



This map shows how the original train bed was used for the GAP bike trail, and how the trail circumnavigates the Pinkerton Horn because of the tremendous expense of rehabilitating the closed, legacy tunnel:

Daylighting the Pinkerton Tunnel

The double-height trains won't be able to fit in the Pinkerton Tunnel. Because of the geology, the railroad has decided to "daylight" the train tracks that run through the mountain, which means they'll remove all the earth above the tracks until daylight shines down upon them. (click for project details) It's a huge amount of material. In order to accomplish this, the railroad has chosen to cut down all the trees above the bike trail.

This map shows where the mountain will be cut away over the new train line, "daylighting" the tracks and permitting double-height train cars. It also shows the central area in which the trees are being cut down along the top of the ridge.


This photo from last week shows the bike trail at the west portal of the old closed tunnel, and the deforestation above the trail detour.

A Project Management Perspective

From a project management perspective, I think about all the times I've tried to get something done and run into "You can't do that, because yada yada yada". These transportation engineers run into constraints and say, hey let's just remove that mountain. Wow, just wow. I'd like to have some of that mojo.

A NextGen Perspective

NextGen is industry's proposed satellite-based aviation system.
The Panama Canal:

• From a Theory of Constraints perspective, the Panama Canal is the constraining factor in shipping between Asia and the East Coast.
• In a curious NextGen analogy, once again we see that capacity is about the constraint, and the constraint is concrete.
• You could give all those ships brand new GPS units, but it wouldn't increase capacity at all.

The Railroads:

• The capacity constraint was the tunnels (concrete)
• giving those trains updated satellite links won't do a thing to increase capacity

It's all about the concrete.

NextGen Derivative Financing: You Down With PPP?

Following up on a previous post: Recent stories in the press/web have announced a financing scheme to pay for the proposed NextGen aviation system, with a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) using federal seed money as a funds multiplier (gosh thanks, Enron!) to buy NextGen gizmos for every airline — satisfaction guaranteed.

NextGen is an industry wet-dream ISO somebody willing to pay for it.

The gizmo makers can't convince the airlines to pay for it, they can't convince the military to pay for it, and they can't convince Congress to pay for it. They can't sell it as economic stimulus, they can't sell it as infrastructure investment, and they can't sell it as a pre-need bailout.

When you can't pay for something the old fashioned way, but you're highly self-motivated to sell the product and ship it, warts and bugs features and all, you look for new ways to pay for it. If it's not right - well, what brand-new, leading edge invention is ever right in version 1.0? You don't want to by the first-year Tesla; you want to buy the fifth-year Prius. But industry wants everybody to throw out all the Prii and replace them all with Tesla 1.0's.

What's the Problem? Who's Problem is it?

Usually we spend money to solve problems. A problem is a discontinuity between expectations (subjective) and perceived reality (subjective). Problems, then, are a rather squishy phenomenon, subject to interpretation and bias. When I see problem-solving that I don't understand, I wonder: what problem are they solving? Whose problem is it?

What problem is NextGen Public-Private Partnership (PPP, or P³) financing solving? Here's my answer, yours may vary:

NextGen is industry's marketing package to sell, update, and maintain an unspecified technical project to people who cannot evaluate its merits; it is cynical rent-seeking at its essence.

The NextGen hype-bubble is getting long in the tooth. They've sold the sizzle to people unable to evaluate the claims, and they can't find anybody capable of evaluating the issue who is willing to spend their own money on it.

The problem is figuring out how to get industry the money it has been expecting out of the NextGen swindle.

The problem that NextGen Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) financing solves is moving money out of the public coffers and into the military-industrial complex under the guise of delivering NextGen aviation. The problem belongs to industry. The PPP financing solution benefits industry.

NextGen Marketing

It's been very easy for marketing to hype NextGen as all things to all people. When somebody says, I don't like ________, they say "NextGen will solve that!" When somebody asks, How come I can't do this, they say "NextGen can do that!"

Marketing tells NewYorkers it's going to eliminate delays at JFK, LGA, and EWR. Marketing tells the airlines they'll save money. Marketing tells the government they'll pay for NextGen by throwing everything else away. Marketing tells pilots they'll be in charge of their own destiny. That's all hype.

If you're industry, it's okay to sell and ship a buggy product - there's often more to be made in debugging adaptation and upgrades than there is in the original product; the trick is to get the client (Uncle Sam) to lock themselves in to the product line you're selling, because once they're committed to it there's no way they can reverse themselves, and then you own the market and you might even own the client.

What's the NextGen Guarantee "OrWhat" ?

Cynics may be making clucking sounds and asking Guaranteed? Guarantees don't mean anything without an established OrWhat. The OrWhat completes the syllogism, it defines the compensation. In other words, your satisfaction is guaranteed - or what?

• Guaranteed Lowest Prices OR Double the Difference
• Guaranteed Satisfaction OR complete refund
• Guaranteed OnTime OR free upgrade

What's the OrWhat in this NextGen financing scheme? What's the deal if NextGen isn't as profitable as the gizmo-makers promise? What, what, what?

Follow the Money

Use of the Public-Private Partnership was authorized in HR 658, FAA Reauthorization and Reform Act of 2011. The PPP was not included in the original legislation, but was added by Rep. John Mica as Amendment One.

They couldn't sell NextGen with any of the several initial approaches that they tried, so they've moved into more nuanced arrangements. Remarkably, as soon as FAA Reauthorization with Mica's Amendment One passed the House, a financial boutique shop announced the establishment of the NextGenFund (logo shown).

The NextGenFund (which is a private, for-profit enterprise) will use $150 Million in federal loan guarantees to generate $1.5 Billion in NextGen purchases (this used to be called betting on the come, then it was called leverage, and now it's called a Public Private Partnership).

The federal government will guarantee the loans made by the speculators private sector. The speculators will advance money to the airlines to buy NextGen technology from industry (goal-1) at a specified interest rate (goal-2). The airlines will attempt to use the NextGen gizmos to make money (goal-3). The airlines will take that money as profits, and they'll use part of it to pay off the loans.

What if the airlines don't profit as much as the marketing hype promised? What if they don't make anything additional? What if nextGen implementation is delayed? In any of those disappointing eventualities, airline satisfaction is guaranteed, and they don't have to pay for the gizmos.

Who does pays industry for the gizmos? Who pays the profit to the speculators? That's when federal loan guarantee kicks in, and the taxpayers pay for it (goal-4).

Cui Bono?

The tone of the press coverage is notably "oh good, now we have away to pay for NextGen" and they don't seem to critically ask, "Should we spend a forture on this new technology?", "Will it deliver benefits that justify the cost?", "Who will pay for this, and who will benefit?"

What a sweet deal. Marketing overhypes a vapor-ware product that doesn't exist yet, sells it to a public that can't evaluate the promise, and if the system fails to meet airline expectations then the taxpayers have to pay for it - which was what they wanted in the first place. All of the benefits accrue to the gizmo-makers, the speculators, and the airlines. All of the costs and risks go to the taxpayers.

What are the odds this goes wrong?

NextGen promises a brand new aviation system, completely replacing the existing (tested, safe, world's best) system. There is no definition of the scope of NextGen; there is no documentation of what is (and more importantly, what isn't) included in NextGen. It's been sold as all things to all people.

Russ Chew isn't saying this is going to be easy -- but just in case, if it goes over budget, off schedule, or if it fails to deliver the marketing hype -- then the federal government will pay for it. What are the odds?

Restating the NextGenFund.com PPP Guarantee in Standard Format

Guaranteed

On Schedule On Budget Expectations Exceeded Significant Savings

OR

Uncle Sam The taxpayers will buy it for you.

The Usual Suspects

Industry has packed the Public-Private Partnership with former government officials, a menagerie of Used-To-Be's with impressive titles. What is surprising is that when you look into the aftermath of their official tenures, there isn't any evidence of their lasting postive contribution.

• What did Russ Chew leave better than he found it?
• What did Marion Blakey leave better than she found it?

(Editor's Note: Point out that Republican Mica's Legislation has only passed the House. Curious that the Used-To-Be's (Chew, Blakey) were all Republican appointees. Hmm.)

Someday when you have time to watch a 14-slide presentation, check this out. Resist the urge to make sure you still have your wallet.




My compliments to the marketing team that released this PPP financing news just before all the media focus shifted over to the government shutdown. Nicely played.

Guaranteed NextGen Results . . . or it's Free!

At times this blog touches on arcane aspects of transportation policy. Previous entries have dealt with the NextGen aviation system, presented by the marketing departments solution providers of various industrial vendors as the Next Best Thing that will move aviation into the future.



Posts have included Runways as Constraints and a New York NextGen metaphor. We talked about solving the ATC Delay Problem, reframing the topic as the Airline Scheduled Delay Problem and suggesting,

The airlines and the airports have been overbooking the runways just like the airlines overbook seats on their planes. They do it because it's cost-effective; the profits go to the airlines and airports, and the costs go to the traveling public and the economy. When too many show up, they bump some back to the next hour, and so on, and so on.

In this analysis of NextGen we looked at a comparison of Costs and Benefits provided by Robert May, who is a NextGen shill advocate:

I'd like to point out that the costs exceed the benefits through at least the year 2027, in this chart prepared by somebody trying to put the best face possible on NextGen.

Just because the costs exceed the benefits doesn't mean NextGen isn't profitable; the industry will find great profit when if they can sell these gizmos. The people who pay for the gizmos, and the economy overall, will be at a net loss.

Everything I know about Nextgen and Delays

Great technology. Expensive. Not a replacement. Won't fix delays. Runways are the constraint. Airlines and airports intentionally overbook runways.

Gosh, that was easy. 152 characters, less than a text message. I don't dislike NextGen; I do have a problem with industry misleading the American public. Here's a set of recommendations for actually eliminating most airline / airport delays.

Selling the Dream

There are several challenges facing any salesman who needs to sell NextGen solutions. NextGen won't be backwards-compatible with existing, proven aviation equipment. It's as if the 1990s cellphone companies were selling phones that could call other cellphones but couldn't call landline phones. The benefits are subtle and limited; the costs are very high. Given this dog of a situation, salesmen respond with rhetoric and try to sell the sizzle, not the steak.

Whenever they can, the salesmen describe the existing system as outdated 1960's technology. As a taxpayer and passenger, I don't mind that we're using a reliable, time-tested, evolved system that's been paid for. Industry's sales pitch requires describing the status quo as hopelessly outdated.

As a species we've only been flying for a little over 100 years. To describe anything in aviation as "same old same old" is ludicrous. We've been using roads for millenia and I don't see anybody saying, "Roads? That's so 1410!"

Paying for the Dream

How does industry and their hired hands convince somebody, anybody to pay for it? How does industry move from pitching gizmos to selling the dream?

Scorched Earth

The first approach was to cost-justify the NextGen expense by claiming that it would replace all ground-based navigation systems and all ground-based radars. We could throw out all the old stuff, stop maintaining the buildings, and we wouldn't need maintenance people.

That was a good marketing pitch, and the spreadsheets ended up with usable numbers, but the reality was quite different: the Defense Department insists on maintaining the ground-based radars, the existing aircraft fleet requires a ground-based navigation system, and - by the way - the Chinese are capable of disabling satellites, NextGen is vulnerable to fifty-year solar events, and in most applications the (legacy, old, outdated) ground-based systems have lower weather minimums that NextGen. The scorched-earth value proposition didn't kick.

Economic Stimulus

The second approach to getting somebody to buy NextGen was positioning this big-ticket purchase as a new wave economic stimulus and an infrastructure investment, much in the way that we're rebuilding bridges and highways. This proposition didn't sell either.

Bailout

The third approach to getting somebody to buy NextGen was positioning it as the savior of the American airline industry; our economy needs the airlines, they're Too Big To Fail, let's bail them out and keep them operating by having the government buy the gizmos for the airlines, and for the business jets, and screw those little puddlejumpers. Instead of "first come, first served" let's talk about "best equipped, best served" - now, that's a tagline for a gizmo sale!

This was an attempt to gloss over the fact that except for a few early adopters, most airlines have decided they're not going to spend their money on NextGen; they'll accept it if somebody else buys it for them, but they're not rushing to invest in it themselves. This approach didn't succeed either, and the fact that airlines won't buy NextGen with their own money is generally understood now.

Complex Derivative Financing

Industry's newest approach to selling NextGen, which is beginning to look like a white elephant with a tattoo saying "Solution in Search of A Sucker", is to use complex derivative financing to pay for the gizmos, because the inscrutability of derivatives is socially acceptable and we're running out of ways to sell this stuff - which, again, nobody will buy with their own money.

Industry is no longer developing innovative solutions; they're now searching for innovative financing techniques to get somebody to commit to buying these gizmos. From today's Wall Street Journal, "New Way to Upgrade Air Control", (also: Bloomberg)

On Monday, ITT and Nexa Capital Partners LLC are expected to announce proposals to use about $150 million in federal loan guarantees as seed money to establish a larger, self-sustaining fund to pay for installing upgraded equipment on potentially thousands of U.S. airliners.

The goal is to help carriers fund their piece of a delay-plagued effort by the Federal Aviation Administration to create a satellite-based traffic control network.

Expected to cost more than $40 billion overall, the next-generation solution has been stymied by a persistent reluctance by airlines to invest billions of dollars to upgrade airborne devices. Now, after years of delays and futile industry lobbying for direct federal aid, ITT and its partner believe they have found the key to overcoming airline resistance.

ITT Chairman Steven Loranger has championed the loan-guarantee fund despite initial disinterest—and sometimes even hostility—from various industry players. The most unusual aspect is that airlines would gradually repay the cost of equipping planes only after they start reaping fuel and schedule benefits.

Nexa Capital's managing partner, Russell Chew, a former senior FAA and JetBlue official, said in an interview that the proposed fund is unique because it is pegged to the FAA's ability to deliver on promised benefits. If the rollout of NextGen falters due to a lack of agency or congressional support, airlines essentially would be off the hook for repaying the loans.

It might work. There's a sucker born every minute. More coming.

(Solar) Weather Delays: A Curious Juxtaposition

I had two headlines in my inbox that suggest a curious juxtaposition.

First was a story about Boeing ATC being awarded a major research & development support contract worth up to $1.7 billion for the Next-Generation Air Transportation System. They're going to shift from air traffic control to air traffic management.

A large portion of this effort is moving from a ground-based system to a space-based system, moving facilities from the (existing) ground grid to satellites, and moving decision making from the (existing) command-and-control structure to a systemic, profitability-sensitive collaborative model.

Which is good news for primary beneficiaries Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Airbus and Cessna, and secondary beneficiaries Adacel, Ensco, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Harris, Honeywell, Jeppesen, Jerry Thompson & Associates, Mosaic ATM, Spectrum Software Technology, Tetra Tech ATM, and the Washington Consulting Group. The entire military-industrial complex is eating at this trough.

Second is a story from NASA about expected increases in solar activity over the next decade, which have the ability to compromise GPS, satellites, space-based systems, and datalink communications.

The new National Space Weather Program notes how "people of the 21st-century rely on high-tech systems for the basics of daily life. Smart power grids, GPS navigation, air travel, financial services and emergency radio communications can all be knocked out by intense solar activity. A century-class solar storm, the Academy warned, could cause twenty times more economic damage than Hurricane Katrina."

I'm just wondering: are they reading each other's press releases?

Airport Delays and Capacity : Runways vs NextGen at JFK

I know that this August is a terrible time for delays and frustration, particularly in the New York City airports - EWR, LGA, JFK. I would like to summon the voice of Zero Mostel (or maybe Ed Koch) to intone, "So, you think this year is bad? Feh! Wait till you see next year!"

Kennedy Airport - I remember back when it was Idlewild - has four runways. Next spring, they're going to close the longest runway (the bayside runway, 13R-31L) for maintenance. That's March, April, May, June, July of 2010. August is going to look great at JFK next year after March through July.

One-third of all JFK operations happen on runway 13L-31R. JetBlue, who's business is based on their hub operation at Kennedy, is quite concerned.

Port Authority Director Chris Ward described the rehab as "open heart surgery" on an airport. Port Authority officals said the Federal Aviation Administration would "reschedule flights" so the other three runways could "absorb" the extra traffic. (That's an illusion if not an outright lie. They're just blame-framing. Let's be clear: the Port Authority is closing the runway. They're preparing to blame the FAA for the delays.)

As in all public works, the trade-off is a season of inconvenience for a decade of improved conditions. Next spring at Kennedy: FUBAR.

To me, this is an opportunity for evaluation. There are two schools of thought on what causes delays in general, and in NY's Big Three in particular. Perhaps this opportunity will serve to illuminate our minds.

The Robert Poole / Reason Foundation / military - industrial - complex says that delays are caused by an outdated, WW2-era air traffic control system. The Next-Gen vendors (who, remarkably, sell a solution) have repeatedly told Congre$$ that NextGen's advanced capabilities are essential to avoiding delays.

All the air traffic people I know say that delays are caused by airline schedules that exceed runway capacity.



This runway closure provides a comparative test-bed, a way to find out which theory is more valid. In Karl Popper's words, one or more of these theories is falsifiable. Our body of knowledge will be advanced by identifying which position is flawed. The test of a theory, you'll remember, is (1) is it falsifiable?, (2) does it explain what we observe?, and (3) does it help predict the future?

If Robert Poole and the NextGen Salesmen are right, they should be able to implement satellite-based procedures that avoid delays during the construction closure. No big deal.

If the runways-as-constraint contingent is right, the fact that runways are the limiting factor will be amply demonstrated when they close JFK's longest runway for months. Major delays.

I have a follow-up question: We know about this mishmash seven months before the event. Nobody will be surprised by it. If there are delays, caused by the airlines scheduling too many airplanes for a time when the airport's capacity is limited, will we call it an ATC Delay, or will we call it an Airline Scheduling Delay, or will we call it a Port Authority Delay? I'm just asking.

If anybody wishes to place a small, friendly wager on the outcome, leave me some contact info in the Comments section. After this paving job in Queens is done, there's a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you. (I'll note that Robert Poole is into privatizing bridges, too.)

NextGen ATC / Next Gen Air Traffic Control

I'd like to wrap up my series on NextGen and delays. I've enjoyed writing it, I hope you found some value in it. I'd like to summarize the key points and make a few closing comments. Then I'm going to get back to blogging about Google and the Tour de France.





Some comments and emails talked about my weaving other sources into my story - Joe Overton, Aristotle, Patrick Moynihan, Immanuel Kant, Eli Goldratt, Adam Smith, George Orwell, Garrett Hardin, etc. I'm not trying to impress people with Wikipedia links. Here's the thing: we have specialized operational knowledge. If we want to speak to the general public, if we want to be more persuasive than the paid mouthpieces of industry, then we need to tell our story in terms the public will understand and find credible. No TLA's. Why should they believe me? They shouldn't. Why should they believe Kant? Because he's a known quantity that's stood the test of time.

NextGen ATC

NextGen is not my enemy. I think it's pretty cool.

The people (over)selling NextGen as a replacement system are shills, and they are not my friend. When they misrepresent operational reality to the public, I think we should call BS on them.

NextGen will be great for helicopters, particularly Lifeguard missions and flying in the Gulf of Mexico. NextGen will be great on midnight shifts and in tactical opportunities. It will be a wonderful and very expensive supplement to the airspace system. NextGen will not provide a substitute for the current airway structure.


Cost Benefit Projection from testimony of James May, CEO Air Transport Association of America, a NextGen ATC supporter

NextGen and ATC Delays

NextGen will not reduce airport delays in any significant way. Runways are the constraint. Delays are caused by airlines and airports that intentionally overbook the airport, just like they overbook flights. Delays are not ATC delays, unless they're caused by a radar outage, etc. Delays are "airline schedule delays".

If you want to dramatically reduce delays, use the engineering performance standards for airports to compute hourly traffic capacity, choose a weather percentile at which delays will be acceptable, and enforce the airport capacity limits on the airline schedule. If an airport permits airlines to schedule flights in excess of airport capacity, take away their AIP money.

Personally, I like the idea of federal capacity calculations and locally regulated airports. Let the Port Authority decide which 95 planes per hour can land or takeoff. It is, in fact, their business.


Flow Control is a sham that stands between the unrestricted, unrealistic airline schedule and known airport capacity, and creates delays to avoid unsafe chaos. Airlines overbook the airport, flow control bumps the excess. We've been doing this for decades and delays remain exactly the same. We should stop repeating this non-effective behavior.

Here's all I know about Nextgen and Delays. Great technology. Expensive. Not a replacement. Won't fix delays. Runways are the constraint. Airlines and airports intentionally overbook airports. Gosh, that was easy. 152 characters, just over a Tweet. Why did I need a week to get there?

I would like to say this: There is a spectrum of opinion about ATC. At one end are people who know that the American ATC system is the finest in the world, that our controllers are brilliant gifted artists who make things work that wouldn't work if left to themselves, that controllers are key players in the safety chain, that ATC is valued-added and worth more than it costs, and that ATC is an inherently governmental function that cannot be performed by private industry.

At the other end of the spectrum are people who believe that an air traffic facility is just a glorified phone center filled with radiotelephone operators with unjustified self-esteem and delusions of grandeur. It's not a remarkable value-add; it's a cost center, providing a commodity task that any kid can do. Government is inappropriately in control of our air transport system, and the economy would be better off without the intrusion. Private industry can do it better, cheaper, faster. And then they often say: my company, Acme, can sell you systems that can make this happen.

NextGen is not my enemy. People who think air traffic controllers are overpaid phone center operators are my enemy.

Thanks for reading.

An Operational Critique of NextGen

skimmers - click for main point

Let’s review Robert Poole and Kathryn Wylde’s Cause. Perhaps later we’ll look at who profits from their rhetoric.

They champion a new air navigation system called NextGen. Using these technologies, pilots will be free to navigate dynamically. If you buy the hype, freed of a route structure that looks like the 1950's interstate highway system, pilots will be able to reroute themselves, and they'll separate themselves from other aircraft.



The problem with our archaic World War Two system, Poole pontificates, is that it makes airplanes line up for runways, airports, cities, and routes. If we’d use GPS (and other variations on the theme) to let pilots navigate direct, we’d save millions, and avoid the queuing that causes such onerous delays.

I generally write in a self-deprecating tone, but I know that in order to persuade I should present credentials and attempt to establish credibility (ethos). I’ve been a pilot and a controller. I understand and have used these technologies.

GPS and NextGen do present remarkable navigation capabilities. They allow individual planes to navigate direct, to develop creative routes around weather, and they would free airplanes from having to participate in a rigid system.

There is very little new under the sun. Philosophically, the problem is Immanuel Kant's Kant’s categorical imperative. In response to the question, Is it OK for me to do (yada yada)?, Kant would ask, Would it be OK for everybody to do it?

If there’s only one driver in town, can he drive wherever he wants? Sure. Drive one-way streets the wrong way, ignore stop signs and lights? Yes.


And in fact, if there’s only ten cars in the city, you can still mostly get away with that sort of chaos, although – eventually – someone’s going to get killed, and then you’ve probably only got eight cars.

It’s tremendous for one person. It's amazing in a limited situation. Kant would ask, Is it okay if everybody does it? And the answer is: No. It would be a disaster with 500 drivers and cars.


             Überlingen Midair        Re-enactment Video

When you scale the city up to a thousand drivers, all of a sudden we don’t permit that sort of libertarian chaos. We have one-ways, two-ways, turn lanes, flyovers, HOV lanes, limited access highways, right on red – we get pretty gritty about the details. Overall it’s a mostly efficient, mostly safe system that permits unfettered access without pre-arrangement – you can drive to any address you want, whenever you want – and does it without direct user fees or reservations. Society manages the cost of the system, paid for by the common wealth through a variety of public taxes.

Ahhhh. I'm glad that's settled.

So I’m wrapping up this car analogy, I’m leaning back smugly, and Robert Poole might say: but wait, this is the informal fallacy of false analogy – cars and roads are only two-dimensional, and airplanes fly in a three-dimensional construct. There’s no reason to force them to go even-streets north, odd-streets-south; put them at different altitudes. Let them fly where they want! Embrace the flexibility inherent in the system!

And Robert Poole would be right. Aviation is three-D; in fact, if you’re good at it, it’s four-D, but that’s another topic. But there’s two times during each flight when airplanes are just like cars, when they’re two-dimensional just like cars, and that’s when they’re using runways (roads) to takeoff and land.

A funny thing about runways: they’re long, and they’re straight, and they’re not very adjustable. Planes have to “line up” on runways. You can’t move a runway (although aircraft carrier runways do move around pretty well). When planes line up with runways to land and to take off, they tend to fly over the same houses all the time, and NIMBY neighbors don’t like that.

You can run all the 3-D matrix airspace configurations you want, but the bottom line is that airplanes have to line up for a runway. With airliners, generally speaking we only want one airplane using a runway at a time – so each runway has a maximum capacity of x airplanes per hour. When the weather goes from CAVU to cloudy to nasty, a good runway's occupancy rate goes from 40 planes/hour, to 25 planes/hour, to 20 planes/hour.



Runways are the choke points that cause air traffic congestion in New York, Chicago, and LosAngeles. Planes have to line up on runways, they’re a fixed property with a limited capacity (that decreases in bad weather). You want a new technology that reduces delays? Build a better mousetrap – figure out a way to do without runways.



Runways and runway capacity are the keys to avoiding air traffic delays. NextGen does nothing to address runway acceptance rates.

Some Wonderful Things About NextGen

I don't want to give the impression that I'm anti-NextGen, that I'm a Luddite who misses the days of four-course radio ranges - which, by the way, was a navigation system based on Venn diagrams. So let me mention some wonderful things about NextGen.


NextGen is going to open up new remarkable capabilities for use in limited situations. It's going to be wonderful for the oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, which is completely (and almost negligently) underserved by the present system.

NextGen is wonderful for "Midnight Rules". In the wee hours, when traffic is down to about 5% of peak times, you can run a lot of direct routes and approve things you'd never do on a dayshift. In fact, UPS and FedEx use a lot of cool techniques that are available right now, today on the midnight shifts. The problem is: you could never use these schemes on the day shift.

Here's a slightly dramatic example of NextGen saving lives:

EastBumfuStan is located 150 miles from the Metropolis mega-trauma center. It's snowing heavy. Out on the interstate, one car spins into another, there's a chain reaction in the low visibility, there's a twenty-car pileup. There's three severely injured people. Local volunteer firefighters have made it to the scene. Ambulences are on their way from 40 miles away; they're travelling in heavy snow, and the local hospital is not up to treating those people and saving their lives.

Back in 2009, those people would die. But it's 2015. Over at Stat MedEvac, a dispatcher double-clicks on the area map, and sees the local high school football field, the tall AM radio antenna a mile away, and the power lines running east-west. He designs an instrument approach and departure procedure so a helicopter can land at the high school, even in these snowy conditions. He thinks he's done, so he submits it to a validation program that checks his work. The software points out that he failed to consider a hill in the local terrain. He adjusts the approach course, the validator confirms the procedure, and he datalinks the details to the helo crew that's already in the air.

The crew lands, picks up two patients, and takes off for Metropolis. Another helicopter lands five minutes later and picks up the other critical patient. They all live. They'd have died in 2009.

NextGen can do that. For instrument flights at low altitude, in areas without ground-based navigation aids, NextGen is going to be remarkable.

Let me point out something about my two examples: they're both about helicopters. Helicopter aviation, specifically the Medevac and Gulf communities, is completely underserved in the current system. You should care about this, because when there's a terrible accident, it's a helicopter that means life or death.

The other side of the coin is: in both of these examples, the helicopters benefit because they don't need runways. Neither of these examples apply for fixed-wing (ie, normal) (sorry) aircraft that need runways.

---

NextGen would be a remarkable supplemental system. If you overlaid NextGen on top of today's system, there'd be an awful lot of small benefits realized.

Here's the primary issue: NextGen is so expensive, the industry and the salesmen can only cost-justify it by presenting it as a complete replacement for the current system. In other words, if you shut off all the radars and all the navigation beacons, and save all the money from maintaining them, only then might NextGen be justifiable. Trouble is: NextGen is not an acceptable stand-alone system.

In a June 14, 2009 story in the Dallas Morning News, aviation consultant Michael Boyd expressed his doubts.

Not only is the program management lacking, he said, but the technology of managing the air space may not be up to task. "I have no confidence this is going to work," Boyd said. "The public is simply being bamboozled... ...about how this is working."

There’s a few other details about NextGen.

• NextGen offers a remarkable capability for navigation. That new capability doesn't scale well; you can let 5% of today's volume use it, and you can use it tactically when situations permit, but you can't use it as the sole basis for 5000 airplanes at a time.
  
• NextGen cheerleaders say that more accurate navigation (that's true) will permit aircraft to fly closer together on final approach (that's false). Separation on final is driven by wake turbulence, not navigation ambiguity.
  
• Way back in the days of Najeeb Halaby, there were conflicts between civilian and military expectations. The system is obligated to provide "primary radar" coverage. NextGen advocates want to shut that off in order to cost-justify NextGen.
  
• There is no complete, published technical specification for NextGen systems. No defined deliverables. It's vaporware. It's a vendor's fantasy.
  
• NextGen would not have tracked any of the 9-11 hijacked aircraft.
  
• If an aircraft doesn't want to be tracked, NextGen can't track it.
  
• If an aircraft has a total electrical failure (like say, AirFrance447, the Airbus off Brazil), NextGen can't track it.
  
• NextGen depends on a military system. The military has the right to turn it off.
  
• It depends on a satellite system that’s subject to solar interference.
  
• We’re behind on maintaining the satellite array.
  
• By the way, the Chinese have figured out how to disable satellites. It doesn't seem prudent to put all our eggs in that basket.

The vision of NextGen does some really impressive things. It would be a great supplemental system, but it's not sufficient as a stand-alone system. It does not provide sufficient stand-alone tracking capability. It can't support the volume of traffic at intermediate altitudes. It's tremendously expensive. Although the vendors want to sell it, it's not an acceptable "equal or better" replacement for the existing aviation system.


See Also:
ADS-B promises a lot
Why NextGen will not triple capacity