The A4A won't give up

I sorta promised, I would go on about my last post. I guess I didn't think it would take a month and a half. I thought either the AIRR bill would get jammed through and there would be no stopping it, or it would go away. It almost went away, it was put on a shelf.

Representative Shuster has left a hole in the budget for a private ATC. Of course Mr Shuster is a little too friendly with the whole A4A crowd. He ought to recuse himself from this discussion. Follow the money they say, well Mr Shuster gets quite a bit of money from the A4A. Draw your own conclusions about weather this gentleman is representing his constituents or not.

So there is an argument, as there always is when congress wants to change the FAA, we are still using "WWII technology called RADAR". Oh my, that antiquated RADAR technology is going to make the aircraft fall out of the sky. Modernization isn't happening as fast a someone wants it to. Satellite based separation is the future and we need it now.

The sad thing is, the FAA's ATC system supports satellite based navigation. The ERAM program added it long ago. ADS-B was part of CARTS that was replaced by STARS/TAMR which had ADS-B 15 years ago. The fact is, the airlines are whining that it will cost them too much to equip older aircraft with ADS-B by 2020. The US Air Force is also complaining that they don't have the budget to make the 2020 ADS-B deadline. The trouble isn't the FAA, the trouble is the users can modernize quick enough.

I guess it makes sense. If they add another bureaucracy to keep the process inefficient, then there will be someone else to blame when they don't make the deadline. The A4A and the airlines seem to be arguing the private ATC corporation will be better, faster and cheaper. NASA learned that lesson a long time ago, better, faster cheaper can't happen. In this case, Faster will be hung up in committees and interfaces. Better will be hung up with new management wanting to change and current employees explaining why the new way won't work. Cheaper, well, government right.

The Shuster/A4A bill will create this fancy corporation. There will be a board to make the critical decisions. Critical decisions will be things like what products should be funded. Since the board will be mostly airline appointments, the choices will generally benefit the airlines more than anyone else. Imaging a 9/11 type situation, where all the flights are ground stopped. Who will pay the corporation for the week the aircraft didn't fly? It'll take a government bailout probably, or the corporation will veto national security, and require the airlines fly their normal schedule.

The Senate FAA Reauthorization Act of 2016 (S. 2658) is welcomed by many of the aviation groups. I think they will take anything but the AIRR act. There are plenty of things wrong with this bill as well. It may go too far regulating airline fees and seat sizes and a few other things the airlines don't like. Amendments and markup can fix those things. A couple things that are bad in the bill is related to model aircraft, the bill requires training for operators, and safety standards for model aircraft that some argue would be difficult for manufacturers to meet. 

If someone has a rational argument as to how this private ATC system will work, send the comments here. I haven't seen any evidence that this is something other than a power grab by the airlines.

ASDI what is it?

When we go to FlightAware.com, FlightExplorer or any of the other flight tracking web sites or apps, they have a lot of good information. The information all comes from the FAA, for free! Ever think about the FAA and how they collect that information? How does is all come together? 

All over the country, there are RADAR sensors. These RADAR sensors are scanning the skies 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The output of the RADAR sensor is sent to a computer, where the range and azimuth data is correlated to the transponder and altitude data. In the drawing below, the black line coming out of the RADAR dish is the interrogation signal, the black line coming back it the "skin paint" reflection signal, and the blue line is the transponder broadcast from the aircraft.

The computers correlate the transponder code to the flight plan, and take the RADAR returns and calculate a speed, altitude and track that the aircraft would be on. The flight plan helps determine where the airplane will be, based on the speed and time since last sample. 

All of the track information for all of the RADAR systems are sent to the FAA command center where they are made available for display in the various FAA systems that need the information (IE URET, TRACONs, ERAM, TFMA, etc).

One of those system that get the FAA RADAR data is the Aircraft Situation Display to Industry (ASDI). The ASDI data is availble to the airlines and other organizations in the aviation industry. The information includes flight plans, position reports, departure, and cancel flight plans. Using this information sites like FlightAware can present aircraft on maps for the general public. 

The ASDI data only contains non-blocked RADAR and flight plan data for aircraft with IFR flight plans in the US and some of Europe. There is an option available to private aircraft allowing them to block the ASDI data for competitive reasons (IE the president of ATT doesn't want the Verizon corporation to know about some special meetings with a partner or something).  

There are about 4 different kind of feeds of ASDI data. There is the internal FAA feed, the need to know real-time feed, the need to know real-time with European data, and a delayed feed. The real-time feeds are for the airlines and such to use for business reasons. The delayed feed is for the web sites visited by the general public. The delay is like 5 minutes, so it is good enough for people to know when to show up at the airport to get their loved one. 

There is a bit of information that can be derived from the ASDI data. Looking at the ASDI data, someone can determine which airports are taking delays with many aircraft holding. Other things can include looking at the projected track, and weather data to see when it might be best to re-route an aircraft because it is heading toward some convective activity. Airport operators can use the data to count operations relative to other airports, to help improve service. 

The ASDI data feed contains a lot of data. The position reports will be updates of aircraft positions every time the computers are aware of a position update (IE every 12 seconds for enroute RADAR, 5 seconds for TRACON, or 1 second for ADS-B). Typically Monday through Friday in the US there will be 3000-5000 aircraft in the air from 6am to 6pm. 

The FAA has many other services similar to ASDI. Most of it isn't as useful. ASDI is a great resource. 

What do you think.