Airline Foot Dragging on ADS-B

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Occupational hazards come in all shapes and sizes: Nuclear technicians have to worry about ionizing radiation; Amtrak engineers, we’ve just learned, have to dodge cinderblocks hurled at their heads. For journalists—and consumers of news, I hasten to add—the risk is being spun up like a dime-store top with so many incomplete facts, half truths and technical obfuscations that reality, if such a thing even exists, becomes a colorless, odorless vapor.

But sometimes there is an odor—faintly of three-day-old fish—as there was this week over the curious story about the airlines requesting relief from the requirement to equip their aircraft with ADS-B. This is the type of news story in which the face-value aspects might actually be just as they appear, but you can’t help suspecting something’s going on in the background.

As we reported, the gist of the story is that that the airlines, represented by Airlines for America (A4A), have petitioned the FAA for some slack in installing ADS-B in their aircraft by the January 1, 2020-mandated deadline. Specifically, they agree they can meet the deadline for ADS-B Out, but they want a five-year grace period to install the high-integrity position sources required by ADS-B. The shorthand assumption is that this is WAAS-capable GPS, but the ADS-B specs are performance-based, meaning they require a navigation solution of a specific accuracy and integrity and while WAAS is one way of achieving that, it’s not specifically required.

A4A’s pitch (PDF) says such equipment won’t be available in volume in time to meet the 2020 deadline so it wants until 2025. But that’s just for the high-fidelity position source, not ADS-B Out itself.Doesn’t it kind of strain credulity that the airline industry doesn’t appear to have gotten the memo on this? We’ve known for most of the last decade that the 2020 mandate was coming and the GA avionics industry, laudably and at its own risk, has stepped up, so much so that there are far more ADS-B products available than there are buyers to soak them up. When I asked A4A about this, they punted. Not our thing; check with the avionics manufacturers.

So I did. On background—no one wanted to be quoted on this—I was told the high-integrity WAAS-style position sources are available or could be by the 2020 deadline. We’re not talking a lot of volume here, nor is the technology particularly demanding. This is exactly what I suspected. One avionics company said the airlines simply don’t want to spend the money until the bitter end, or beyond, if they can make that work. “It’s been the same with every mandate, with GPWS, with RVSM, with TAWs, with 8.33 Mhz,” one source told me.

Like general aviation, airlines want to future-proof their avionics purchases, avoiding installing new boxes in airplanes that will soon be retired, requiring another expensive upgrade before the first one has amortized. And by the way, it costs between $100,000 and $150,000 to install this equipment in a typical airliner, I’m told. That sounds like a rounding error for a $160 billion industry with only 6000 aircraft to equip, but it adds up in an industry where profit margins are under 3 percent. In other words, I can’t blame the airlines for dragging their feet on making these investments any more than I can blame the owner of a Cessna 210 for doing the same.

Some in the industry continue to question (PDF) the long-term benefits of ADS-B and they worry about the FAA’s ability to deliver on its NextGen promises. It’s no surprise to see a bitter-end investment strategy or none at all. And unlike GA, the airlines have the smack to sit across the table from the FAA and offer enough resistance to make the overseers of this multi-billion-dollar program nervous. The FAA desperately needs buy-in in the form of equipage.

So it appears to be engaged in a sort of dance with A4A’s petition. I’m told that while the agency hasn’t approved the request, it has agreed in principle that if the airlines have ADS-B Out by 2020—1090ES solutions—they can use off-spec position sources if certain conditions are met. One is that airlines dispatching aircraft without WAAS-equivalent position sourcing must use “a Service Availability Prediction Tool (SAPT) where an alternate means of traffic separation in the affected area can be implemented by the ATO.” That takes me back to the early days of GPS, pre-WAAS, when pre-dispatch RAIM checks were required for approach planning. I bet only the real hardcore nerds actually did them.

Drilling into the A4A proposal reveals a certain level of imperial nudity. The proposal says “the performance capabilities of existing GPS receivers provide a safe alternate means of surveillance and control to ADS-B Out standards when alternate means of surveillance, such as radar, are available. These are expected to remain available for the foreseeable future, and certainly beyond January 1, 2025.”

The emphasis is mine. If radar is available for the foreseeable future, why are we spending billions to equip the fleet with ADS-B? It’s one of those annoying questions policymakers hate because the answer rests in an understanding of future infrastructure, to wit, airplanes have to have ADS-B before the government can start unplugging radar and VOR sites, paving the path to the miracle system we’re told NextGen will be. No egg, no chicken.

I doubt if you’ll find many aviation professionals who will go on record saying NextGen is a bust and a boondoggle. Nor do I think they think that. Nor do I think that, although I do suspect it’s festooned with overly complex architecture and is likely vastly overpriced. But what FAA three-letter program hasn’t been?

So my take here is that we’re seeing the same kind of resistance and foot-dragging typical of every FAA mandate, as the avionics exec explained. This one might be a little different by dint of size and the fact that the FAA is upgrading the entire NAS and trying to get users to pay for it, rather than funding it as the kind of fundamental infrastructure investment we used to do in this country and which always returned in multiples economic benefits for everyone. Say this for the stalwart capitalists of the airline industry: They believe in investment, just as long as it isn’t their money. In that regard, they’re no different than the rest of us.

If you’re wondering if there’s a sliver of ADS-B relief for GA here, I’m not sure I see much. If this looks to you like the first crack in the FAA’s monolithic insistence that ADS-B won’t slip its schedule, you’re seeing something I don’t. If you had an old TSO C129 GPS (non-WAAS) you wanted to feed into ADS-B Out, keeping the thing alive past 2020 may be more trouble than just buying any of a dozen ADS-B solutions with built-in WAAS sources.

And well before the mandate, there may be yet more ADS-B with self-contained GPS to pick from, although I certainly hope not. My head’s about to explode just keeping track of what’s out there already. Pity they don’t have the same problem in the airline biz.

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