Weekly Article for Lakeville Journal and Millerton News

By Peter Riva
Copyright 2009 and All Rights Reserved
Date: March 16, 2009
Opportunity Knocking – Two Times
For years you folks have heard me complaining how America has a tendency to discard and buy new
instead of maintain. Our roads, bridges, power grid, sewage systems, gas lines – the list of gently rotting
away public infrastructure is almost endless. We seem to prefer to lay a new road instead of carefully
maintain the old ones. We wait until the bridges are rusted away and then raise millions to build a new,
bigger, better one. So, yes, I have been banging the drum to encourage planned maintenance instead of
this wasteful decay.

However, allow me to flip-flop a little. In a way, it is a darn good thing Bush’s administration did not
repair and renovate the old Air traffic Control System (ATC). The truth is, the old ATC is working with
antiquated computers (some were bought in 1982 – yes, 1982), out-modes radar systems and, worst of
all, an over-burdened, over-worked staff of air traffic controllers. From an ATC primarily designed based
on criteria laid down in 1948, we are currently running thousands of flights per day, crisscrossing this
country and thousands of additional international flights a day coming into this country or over-flying
our airspace. In short, the system is over-burdened and almost at the point of collapse. FAA
administrators (the last 4 anyway) have been begging for the funds to update the system. When Bush
refused, I wrote that he was “taking a shortcut to an air disaster of 9/11 proportions.” Luckily, so far, I
was wrong.

So, with the stimulus package, has come the advent of the next round of pleading from the aviation
community as the FAA (including the new administrator). Only this time they are not asking to renovate
the old system, they want to put in place NextGen ATC – a satellite (GPS) and sophisticated radar (all
weather and all terrain) command and control system which will allow more planes in the air, greater
efficiency, greater safety and, most importantly, greater reliability for aircrews. The margin of flight
safety in the air will go from 1,000 feet separation vertically and 1 mile horizontally to less than ½ that –
and even that close, the precision of GPS will allow for 8 feet accuracy compared to 1,000 feet currently
(if that, in some areas it’s ¼ mile, for instance Chicago’s O’Hare).
 When coupled with the last tube and wing commercial aircraft likely to ever be made by Boeing (the
787) and the replacements called blended wing/body aircraft, NextGen ATC looks set to provide fuel
efficiencies in the order of 20 to 30 percent over the current system and aircraft. That is significant for
global climate change as well as the dollar in the fare-paying passenger’s pocket. And here is another
great reason the stimulus package should be let loose on the NextGen ATC program: it is American, only
we know how, the GPS satellites are ours to command and, in the end, the rest of the world will have to
adopt this system to remain competitive. And that means US jobs, US exports.

(Photo Credit: NASA Photo)

Finally, a manufactured product, made in the good ‘ol USA that we can lead the world with. Now, if
some of that stimulus money can just find its way into the hands of the engineers flying the prototype
NextGen aircraft - X 48b - then their full-size N2A and N2B designs can follow, once again making the US
the best aircraft designers and builders in the world.