Posted on 01/28/2004 11:00:32 AM PST by Pubbie
WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration plans to propose a 16% cut in spending on air-traffic-control equipment and facilities, saving nearly half a billion dollars a year but postponing or scaling back projects aimed at making air travel more efficient.
The proposed $471 million cut in the Federal Aviation Administration's facilities and equipment budget, currently at a level of $2.9 billion, comes partly in response to government audits critical of the agency's spending habits, according to people familiar with the matter. Just like the industry it regulates, the FAA is under pressure to rein in spending, which has expanded 70% since 1996 to $14 billion this year. The increase has been fueled partly by the agency's "lack of basic contract oversight," the Department of Transportation's inspector general told Congress in October.
With the Congressional Budget Office projecting a $477 billion federal budget deficit this year, the planned cuts at the FAA signal the kind of belt-tightening expected throughout the government. Mr. Bush's overall proposal, to be released Monday, is likely to call for cuts in several domestic programs to allow the president to keep a lid on proposed spending while increasing spending for defense and homeland security.
It isn't clear which FAA programs would be targeted under Mr. Bush's proposed reductions. The FAA's facilities and equipment budget typically pays for projects to modernize the agency's vast network of radars, navigation and communications equipment. A proposal to cut spending on those projects during the next fiscal year that begins in October wouldn't immediately have an impact at airports that are experiencing delays, such as Chicago's O'Hare International. The problems identified at O'Hare -- whose percentage of on-time flights has fallen below 60% in recent months -- include alleged overscheduling of flights by major airlines there and, according to the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, a shortage of controllers needed to handle planes.
Still, the size of the proposed cuts is likely to face stiff resistance in Congress, which recently approved legislation that authorizes the FAA to spend $2.9 billion during the 2005 fiscal year. The proposal also comes as the administration is trying to draw attention to its efforts to prevent the kind of gridlock that disrupted air travel before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Last week, the administration took the unusual step of announcing that it had secured agreements from UAL Corp.'s United Airlines and AMR Corp.'s American Airlines to reduce their flight schedules at O'Hare during the busiest hours of the day by 5%.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
It's easy on the highway for drivers to keep their distance from each other, while airplanes have to have minders on the ground verbally describing orders to several airplanes at a time.
What a pre-historic system. You can update the radars all day long, but the underlying concept is prehistoric.
If pilots had well defined places to fly (the "highway in the sky" idea), and could see all of their traffic, as well as their path in the sky as easily as a car driver could, you could completly do away with ATC altogether.
Of course, the FAA can't have that. So they're dragging their feet on anything that goes that direction. They deliberatly keep training and rules complicated. They force new avionics to work along the old rules (like VOR airways) even though GPS navigation is accurate within a few meters.
Pretty sad. Where was the old America I grew up in, where new inventions were celebrated and embraced? Where "Futuristic" ideas were "in", and TomorrowLand was one of the favorite places to go at Disneyland.
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It doesn't amaze me. For one.... Speed of car traffic is much lower, the ability to see traffic much greater, and cars can come to a stop if there is trouble ahead. And yet often enough, they often fail to do so. The rate of car crashes in this country is far higher than that which we would tolerate for air travel, where the potential for fatalities runs in the hundreds per mistake.
We can't have stoplights and merge lanes for aircraft to wait their turn entering airports. Aircraft can not only not be ensured to see all traffic, but the required seperation of minutes and miles is a need based on wake turbulence as well as safe seperation between aircraft themselves. Enroute, one controller oversees quite a large area and aircraft are more self-sufficient. But someone with the ability to see the big picture will always need to be in charge of airport traffic.
I think his point is..... they could probably cut a lot of the fat out and still modernize with less. Agencies always bloat up in anticipation of budget cycles. And they could always do the job with less.
The proposed $471 million cut in the Federal Aviation Administration's facilities and equipment budget, currently at a level of $2.9 billion, comes partly in response to government audits critical of the agency's spending habits, according to people familiar with the matter. Just like the industry it regulates, the FAA is under pressure to rein in spending, which has expanded 70% since 1996 to $14 billion this year.
I'm guessing there's a some controllers already posted on this thread. In my opinion, we could close the FAA headquarters and Tech Center tomorrow AM, and leave the ATC centers to work things out and in 24 hours we'd be humming along as good as new and getting better every week -- at a much lower cost. Let the centers and operating facilities choose what they need.
Speed is irrelevant, as long as relative speeds are kept under control by an ability to "pass"
the ability to see traffic much greater,
With an ADSB type system, all traffic could be displayed in the cockpit, right in the navigation displays. Even traffic without an active system (which would by necessity be outside controled airspace) could be displayed by uplink into the ADSB network from ground radar.
and cars can come to a stop if there is trouble ahead.
And aircraft can almost instantly begin holding patterns. All "highways in the sky", would have some variation on a "shoulder" where they could "pull over" into a holding pattern. Obviously, traffic would have to be kept sparse enough to allow this, but that should be little problem because of the multiple altitudes not available on a standard ground roadway.
We can't have stoplights and merge lanes for aircraft to wait their turn entering airports.
Stoplights no (see above), but merge lanes, yes. If all inbound aircraft "claimed" a virtual landing slot in time and space (Remember, GPS has the correct time down to the nano-second) at some point prior to arrival, then flew the approach not only down an altitude/localizer track, but also in "formation" with a moving slot on the approach path, landing sequencing could be very well coordinated. By definition, aircraft on different landing slots would automatically "merge" when they join the runway glideslope.
Granted, all this takes very sophisticated software, compared to existing avionics. But that's only because existing avionics are so antiquated in their design philosophy. The requisite software to do this would be a piece of cake compared to the computer and the IP network you're now using.
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