Five or six action teams to define plan, tackle potential barriers and outline changes
A year after its creation, the office charged with developing the next-generation US air transport system for 2025 and beyond has begun drafting its strategic plan. Joint Planning and Development Office (JDPO) chairman John Kern says the plan will provide a vision for the future system; identify economic, technical and political barriers to be overcome; and outline strategies to transform the system to cope with forecast demand.
Part of the US Federal Aviation Administration, the JPDO will present the national plan to its senior policy committee by June/July, before circulating the draft to the agencies involved, including the Departments of Transportation, Commerce, Defense and Homeland Security, NASA and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The final version is scheduled to be approved in November and presented to Congress in mid-December.
"We are air traffic management-centric at the moment, because that is where NASA has focused its research, but we will broaden out," says Kern. The initial plan "will identify five or six strategies for the future, and identify the barriers". The JPDO will draw on work performed by Boeing, standards body RTCA and others to capture user requirements and define operational concepts for a next-generation system, to be embodied in a national plan for the first time, he says.
"The USA has never had a national plan for transportation," says Kern. Funded under the FAA's recent Vision 100 reauthorisation bill, the JPDO has been charged with creating a vision for the next-generation air transport system; defining the demand generated and performance required by all airspace users; developing an operational concept to handle the demand and provide the performance; and designing a transition plan to transform the system.
Once the draft plan is circulating, the JDPO will draw up a research and development road-map to the transformed system and form "five or six" action teams to begin work on potential barriers to implementation. The transition from today's modernised system to tomorrow's transformed system is expected to be "very difficult", and is likely to require a lead system integrator from industry, Kern says.
The next-generation system will have to not only cope with projected growth in commercial air traffic, but also accommodate unmanned air vehicles, very light jets and spaceflights, Kern says. The architecture will be built around space-based navigation and communication, system-wide information management, data-links, optimised trajectories and more decision-making in the aircraft, he says.
GRAHAM WARWICK / WASHINGTON DC
Source: Flight International
