Esther Dyson’s Flight School

“Someone from the private sector needs to raise their hand to make NextGen happen,” says Bruce Holmes.  He believes this so fervently that he recently left NASA (where he was  Chief Strategist at Langley Research Center as well as director for strategy development at the U.S. Joint Planning and Development Office (JPDO) in DC), to take up a job as DayJet’s resident guru/hand-raiser.  (Unfortunately, Bruce can’t join us at Flight School, but he sat down with me recently to give me some background for a discussion I’ll be leading on the Florida NextGen initiative.)

 
NextGen is the long awaited, still amorphous “next generation” of aviation technology that should enable so-called free flight, where aircraft can manage their own flight paths and avoid one another without constant oversight from centralized, human-operated air traffic control stations.   It’s controversial, in some quarters at least, because it reduces the need for human controllers – even though they are currently overworked and in short supply. (For example, see this call for caution.)

The benefits include less congestion of air and airports, greater safety, shorter flying times, and of course less need for fuel, resulting in cleaner and cheaper flight..  

 
At DayJet , trying to prove a new business model to a skeptical investor community (the customers seem to be believers), every gallon counts.  And every thousand feet flying too low or every minute vectoring around another plane unnecessarily costs lots of gallons.  So Bruce Holmes’ longtime passion has real business meaning for DayJet.  These same issues  have relatively smaller, but still vital consequences for the established airlines, but  DayJet, with its shorter routes and its attempt to create a new market, will experience relative benefits several times those of the airlines if the technology and rule changes work out.

 
“But we’re not raising our hand alone,” says Holmes.  DayJet is working with partners including Naverus, ITT and   universities and airports throughout Florida.  DayJet has the aircraft and routes; Naverus supplies the RNPs (for Required Navigation Performance, or designated routes); ITT supplies the ADS-B (for Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast) equipment that enables the planes to detect and avoid one another; the airports supply local facilities; and the FAA supplies permission (and oversight). The universities will model and simulate the airspace and environmental footprints for before-and-after benefits evaluations.  Also involved is the Personal Air Transportation Alliance (PATA),  whose members include operators of on-demand fleets of technologically advanced aircraft, including very light jets (VLJs).  Members of PATA include North American Jet, Linear Air and POGO Jet.  (Both Ken Ross of North American Jet and Bill Herp of Linear Air, as well as Ed Iacobucci of DayJet, will be speaking at Flight School.)   

Holmes has been leading this charge for many years, fostering a variety of private-public partnerships from his perch at NASA; now he’s on the other side with more freedom to be aggressive.  Still, he cautions, things take time.  The current order of business – for the next few months – is to work out a Memorandum of Agreement  with the FAA for a demonstration.  And that’s just the beginning: The RNPs take time to be generated, and the aircraft need to be outfitted with ADS-B technology  and a new generation of digital radios.

 “We call it a demo,” says Holmes, but actually it’s an implementation.  “You can’t really demo it without just doing it.”   

 Base case

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, based in Daytona Beach, FL, will be managing  the project.  Starting in May or June, its researchers will assemble baseline data:  Where do DayJet’s planes fly now?  How far do they fly to get from point A to point B, and how high? Later on, that will enable them to determine the impact of the NextGen technology (normalizing for weather, of course). Florida Institute of Technology, from its campus in Melbourne, FL, will oversee the analysis of the footprint benefits in terms of energy, carbon, and noise that accrue to the new airspace operations.

Holmes is working on the assumption that the effects will be significant over time.  “There are 130 airports in seven [southeast] states of interest to us; 55 of them have no control towers. In those airports during bad weather, a plane can’t land until the one ahead of it has landed, and the pilot has gotten out and called the ATC from a land line or cell phone.  And in others, by contrast, there can be enough of a mix of other general aviation and occasional airline traffic to benefit from NextGen capabilities even at airports that are not the main focus of the JPDO and FAA.” In either situation,   NextGen will allow the planes to fly more directly, at higher, more cost-effective altitudes, and to land more quickly.  What could possibly be wrong with that?

Well, one issue raised is cost.  The costs of these systems are the subject of intense debate in both the general aviation and airline community (with the airline industry estimating $1 million per aircraft and the general aviation industry estimating costs at little more than $10,000 per aircraft).   But both the cost and the benefit estimates are probably way off, says Holmes:  “Trying to estimate the cost based on the last generation of radios is like trying to figure the price of the third generation iPhone based on the price of the first bag phones  - AKA ‘bricks’ - we used in cars in the 1990’s.”

All this has already been demonstrated on a small scale, for what it’s worth, by Alaska Airlines, by general aviation operators in Alaska and by carriers such as Qantas in other parts of the world.  And the ability of airplanes to space and merge by themselves without ground radar was demonstrated in June 2005 at the SATS Demonstration in Danville, VA.   But perhaps most tellingly, Alaska Airlines  now uses RNP wherever it can. Nonetheless, the Florida experience is likely to attract more attention.   Even in these days of globalization, the airline establishment considers Alaska remote.