The Pathetic State of Air Traffic Control (in the US)
Our wonderful government providing us with wonderfully antiquated service.
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BUSINESS WORLD
By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Holman W. Jenkins Jr. is a member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal and writes editorials and the weekly Business World column.
Mr. Jenkins joined the Journal in May 1992 as a writer for the editorial page in New York. In February 1994, he moved to Hong Kong as editor of The Asian Wall Street Journal's editorial page. He returned to the domestic Journal in December 1995 as a member of the paper's editorial board and was based in San Francisco. In April 1997, he returned to the Journal's New York office. Mr. Jenkins won a 1997 Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished business and financial coverage.
Born in Philadelphia, Mr. Jenkins received a bachelor's degree from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y. He received a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and studied at the University of Michigan on a journalism fellowship.
Mr. Jenkins invites comments to holman.jenkins@wsj.com.
The Coming Revolution
In Air Traffic Control
August 18, 2004; Page A11
Proving that presidential campaigns have a hard time seeing past the obsolescing issues of yesteryear, George Bush spent recent days harrumphing about European subsidies to Airbus. He even threatened trade action, though we suspect Boeing will prefer to let the issue die once the balance sheet is updated to include subsidies it enjoys indirectly from its Japanese and Italian partners, not to mention $3.4 billion in tax breaks cadged from Washington State.
Never mind, because the real action these days isn't airplanes anyway, but air traffic control, and the revenues that Europe and the U.S. may end up battling over dwarf even those of the jet plane business.
Right now, the most technologically backward office in corporate America is the one flying 30,000 feet overhead. Our air traffic control system still operates in Lily Tomlin world, as if human operators were still required to physically connect and disconnect every phone call. Pilots can't taxi, take off, turn left, turn right, ascend, descend or land without exchanging words and getting permission from somebody on the ground.
Not only does this fill the airwaves with low-efficiency chatter, but useful information is transferred at speeds that would embarrass your dialup modem. The cost in delays, inefficient routing and perpetual gridlock is huge. Planes are perfectly able to fly around thunderstorms, but the ATC system often won't let them. That's why travelers find themselves stuck on the ground from Boston to Atlanta because of bad weather in Cleveland.
The solution has been obvious for years: Using the Pentagon's global positioning system, put a satellite receiver in every cockpit, then link every cockpit to every other cockpit with an "Internet in the sky" so pilots can keep track of each other and avoid collisions.
The result would be the dream of pilots since the ATC straitjacket tightened in the 1950s -- "free flight," wherein each plane would be free to fly its optimal route. But the dream has been troubled by a few hitches. The Pentagon's priority never has been civilian flight, and other nations weren't keen on trusting the U.S. military for a crucial bit of global transportation infrastructure. Or as Jacques Chirac once put it: GPS is a plot to reduce France to "vassal status."
Happily, out of such dubious sentiments has come the epochal development that may soon transform satellite navigation from perpetual bridesmaid to mother of triplets: Europe's launch of its own GPS competitor, Galileo, which will become operational in 2008.
Galileo will be a pay service: The Pentagon gives away its signal free, one reason it's never been spurred by a great lust to offer an aviation-quality civilian signal. Galileo will also accept liability for failures of its commercial service. All told, satellite navigation is already a $12 billion-a-year business. That's predicted to increase ten-fold just a couple of years after Galileo comes on line.
All this unfolded with remarkably little notice, culminating in a deal at June's summit of the U.S. and the European Union. The two systems will be compatible, allowing users to draw on both fleets of satellites for an ultrareliable and precise location fix. Galileo's advent is almost certain to kickstart serious competition to develop sat-nav's aviation potential.
But now there's a domestic stumbling block. Recall that the Pentagon pioneered the Internet, and private entrepreneurs were standing by to develop its commercial possibilities. In air traffic control's case, the hand-off tragically is to another government agency, the FAA.
Sadder still, since Sept. 11, the agency has been backstroking away from satellite-based traffic control as the model for the future. Just one day before the terrorist attacks, a government panel had raised an alarm about GPS's jammability. Suddenly it seemed the agency's ground-based empire of radar stations and 15,000 Lily Tomlins would not be headed for the scrap heap in any foreseeable future after all.
The FAA's mental state these days is aptly reflected in an emergency meeting called last March to explore the theme "Growth Without Gridlock." In fact, flirting with gridlock has become a permanent feature of the agency's way of doing business. In 2000, Delta's chief executive publicly predicted that "rationing" of access to the air was just around the corner.
Recession and terrorism bought the system a little time; Sept 11, to be rude, also allowed FAA to share blame for delays with a whole new homeland security apparatus. But traffic is coming back, and there's a pronounced shift toward smaller planes bypassing hub airports in favor of direct flights. That means more and more aircraft will be vying for the same airspace, reflecting a bottom-up demand for "free flight" by air travelers.
Government agencies are at their best when it comes to inspired backfilling. FAA deserves full credit for tweaking an obsolete system to meet rising demand. Meanwhile, the shift toward playing defense against terrorism has pretty much sidelined any hope of privatizing the air traffic control system in hopes of making it more adaptable and quicker to adopt new technology. But, lo, Galileo's arrival may change the game again sooner than anyone expected.
Our hoped-for scenario: Let the FAA have its radar and army of controllers while private capital takes the lead in building a successor system based on the new and more capable satellite networks that will be appearing in the next few years.
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08-18-2004, 10:45 PM
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