The US Federal Aviation Administration is seeking Congressional approval to divert more than $100 million in 1998 funding towards future air navigation system (FANS) modernisation of US air traffic control centres (ATCCs), following complaints that it was not moving fast enough.
Funding is needed to upgrade 20 US continental and three oceanic ATCCs, including the key Pacific centres at Oakland and Anchorage. The FAA had been planning to hold off installing new computers at its oceanic ATCCs until 2003-5, which would have deferred implementation of the communications navigation, surveillance/air traffic management (CNS/ATM) system until at least 2007.
The US authority has now determined that its existing ATCC computers are in danger of becoming "obsolescent" and need to be replaced by 2000. " We will be able to do something faster than we have been advertising," says FAA associate administrator for research and acquisition George Donohue, speaking at the show.
The International Air Transport Association had been warning that, unless the USA moved sooner to implement CNS/ATM, it would ask the International Civil Aviation Organisation to re-allocate some of its responsibility for oceanic airspace management in the Pacific to other nations already equipped for FANS. Cathay Pacific Airways had also said that, in protest at US delays, it would scrap plans to fit its A340-300s with the new Airbus interoperable modular FANS system (Flight International, 18-24 February, P14).
Oakland and Anchorage are already equipped with controller- pilot datalink communications for trials purposes, but did not have sufficiently modern computer hardware and software to provide traffic handover to more than one sector. Donohue, however, warns that investing in new equipment alone is not enough and that agreements have still to be reached with labour unions to train controllers in the new procedures.
While many Asia Pacific carriers, such as Qantas and Air New Zealand, are equipped and ready to begin operating on FANS routes, the FAA says that major US airlines still need to give their pilots more international exposure to the Boeing 747 FANS-1 package. "The reality is that, in the transition period, we're going to have make allowances for difference in equipment," says Donohue.
He adds that international airlines need to press Washington for a higher priority to be given to modernising the oceanic ATCCs in the face of competing domestic demands.
"The message has got to be made clear to the US Department of Transport how important it is to business to have capable and efficient routes for Asia's economic recovery," he says.
Source: Flight International
