LM Otero, AP
Planes line up at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport on Thursday, Nov. 19, 2009
Early Thursday, the Salt Lake City system that handles flight plan processing for air traffic controllers broke down, and the other center in Atlanta couldn't handle the workload by itself. As a result, flight plans filed by many pilots had to be entered by hand. Because planes cannot take off until their flight plans are in the system, the result was long delays for travelers.
These disruptions are symptoms of a bigger problem – an institutional structure that, despite some well-meaning reforms this decade, is increasingly ill-equipped to handle the needs of 21st-century travel.
This is a system, after all, that guides $200 million jets using aged radar technology that is far less advanced than the GPS devices drivers can buy for their cars.
If air traffic control were being operated as a business, responsible to its paying customers, it's inconceivable that there wouldn't be 100 percent backup for the vital flight plan filing centers to avoid delays like Thursday's. At the very least, if one center goes down, the other should have the capacity to handle the full workload.
The FAA is trying to modernize its operations with a 20-year, top-to-bottom revamp. The cost is estimated at $20 billion for FAA equipment and facilities and up to another $20 billion for those who operate planes to equip aircraft with the necessary gear. Called NextGen, it will largely replace antiquated ground-based radars with GPS navigation, use digital communications (rather than voice) for routine messages, and automate many routine operations that are still handled manually.
But while everyone supports this modernization in principle, the FAA has a long track record of bungling technology upgrades, and the Government Accountability Office has already said that NextGen is at a "high risk" of failure.
The real air traffic problem isn't just old technology and outdated systems. It's a mismatch between the system's tax-funded, government bureaucracy and the needs of today's air travelers.
In most businesses, a major technological upgrade, like that needed by our air traffic system, would be worked out and justified by the company and its customers, with a solid business case for making each investment. There would be mutual agreement on the schedule, and the ability to crack the whip on program managers and contractors to get the projects done on time and on budget.
The FAA can't do any of that.
It gets its capital budget in dribs and drabs from annual congressional appropriations, along with generous amounts of "oversight" (otherwise known as micromanagement). The current "reauthorization" of the FAA budget is more than two years late, making any kind of long-term capital planning problematic.
Plus, in calling the shots, Congress tends to resist cost-saving, productivity-improving measures such as automation and facility consolidation in the interest of preserving jobs in members' districts. But without those kinds of changes, much of the increased-productivity benefits of the new technology go away.
Former Vice President Al Gore and a half-dozen national commissions have called for changing this model, making the FAA's Air Traffic Organization a self-supporting business unit paid directly by its aviation customers and able to go to the bond market for capital funding. So far, none of these recommendations has gained any traction.
Until they do, we're likely to be stuck with a status quo that leads to outages, cost overruns, delays in new technology and chronic delays for air travelers.
___________
Robert Poole is director of transportation studies at Reason Foundation, where he's advised the previous four presidential administrations on transportation issues. He is author of the monthly Air Traffic Control Reform Newsletter.
