Making the ATM infrastructure cheaper will also cost money
On 23-04-2010, in Viewpoint, by steve
Few other parts of the air traffic management infrastructure come in for so much criticism these days than surveillance. To be precise, the hopelessly obsolete, rotating antenna based radar surveillance. Those rotating monsters are not only expensive to buy but they cost and arm and a leg to maintain too. It is no accident that companies in the business of making and selling them are keen to push new and replacement radar projects. The higher the price, the nicer the margin of course.
Places like Europe are teeming with radars and some areas have triple and quadruple coverage, quite unnecessarily one may add. It is a wonder birds don’t get fried in the air as they fly in what must feel like the insides of a microwave oven.
The airspace users have been complaining for a long time about the cost of this infrastructure, urging its elimination and replacement with cheaper and equally effective alternatives.
There are alternatives. ADS-B and multilateration both enable surveillance equal or better than conventional radar in all environments except the airport surface where, for now, only multilateration seems to provide the required precision.
Australia, Canada and the US have shown conclusively what can be done with ADS-B. Considering the price tag, which for ADS-B is 12 times less than conventional radar, making the business case is not that difficult.
The catch: airlines do need to invest in equipping their aircraft to be able to use ADS-B. New aircraft come off the factory with this capability so the issue is mainly the retrofit case, as always. Airlines also need to have their equipment approved by the CAA of the State of Registry but that is less of a problem from a cost perspective.
But Nav Canada is blazing a trail not only in implementing ADS-B surveillance but also in the way the benefits are provided. With the full support of the
airlines and IATA, levels between FL350 and FL400 will be reserved for aircraft with approved ADS-B capability and they will get better service in the form of reduced separation in the otherwise non-radar environment. Non-equipped aircraft may fly there only when they do not constitute an obstacle to the equipped ones.
This is a major departure from earlier practice where companies having invested in equipment were unable to benefit because of those lagging behind. Trying something like this in Europe to-day would probably raise a lot of dust but pretending that you can improve the system without investments on board and without giving certain privileges to those who invest is no way to approach the future.
There is a very important message here. Reducing the cost of the infrastructure (like surveillance) requires the deployment of an agreed alternative, e.g. ADS-B or multilateration, but that too costs money. This cost must be absorbed before the savings from the cheaper infrastructure kick in. The “pain” can be alleviated by giving certain priorities to equipped users and this will also speed up the overall equipage process. This may sound like heresy but if Canada can do it, so can others.
This does not work in reverse though. Demanding cost reductions without investing in the cheaper alternatives will not take the industry anywhere.
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Alex,
This is of course a debate that has been going on for a long time and in the end there are several questions to be answered, among them: do we want to get rid of old tyoe radars with their huge costs with something better and much cheaper (and one may mention other similar legacy bits and pieces ripe for replacement) and hence launch on the path to a future where the cost of providing ATM can indeed be reduced, or we do not want to do this because of the up-front costs involved and want something else. I am not saying this something else is impossible to define but if that is what the industry really needs and wants, it should get together and work on it in ernest. Nobody else will do it for them I am afraid.
About the gadget… the small piece of code embedded on the code of the blog page reads the IP of your provider (this is public data and is needed for finding your browser) and the provider’s location is of course known. From there on, it is easy… Of course in some cases the location of the ISP does not fit well with the location of a user that is at the edge of the serivce area and some of the locations recorded for an ISP may no longer be valid, in which case of course the met and other data may be off by quite a bit. But on the main, it works quite well.
Steve,
I don’t think the comparison is a fair one. The Canadians can segregate their non radar airspace into the haves and have nots, and I doubt whether anyone notices, it doesn’t exactly have the highest population density on earth. But Western Europe does, and we don’t have a non radar area of worthwhile size where ADS-B reduced separation could apply and be useful (do we?).
I’m all in favour of an new approach to ATC, but I firmly believe that the technology-led SESAR way, which demands something like €40 billion up front from its users, who collectively don’t have a dime to rub together between them and have little hope of any return within a decade, is simply not the way to go.
We should think very seriously how to design airspace around what the aircraft CAN do, not what they can’t. If that means different standards for different aircraft, so be it, let’s design the system with that in mind. No doubt this is too difficult for unaided ATCOs who can’t be expected to keep potentially millions of different aircraft type/separation standard pairs in their head, but this is what computers are very good at. This blog isn’t the place to design SES airspace, but maybe it is the place to say, STOP, LOOK, THINK.
PS I’ve just noticed that neat little moon phase gizmo on this page, which tells me exactly what I would see looking out of the window right now here near Oxford if I weren’t staring at this screen… just being curious, how does it know my current location?