[LINK] Flying through clouds

[Ivan Trundle]

On 04/04/2012, at 9:59 PM, stephen at melbpc.org.au wrote:

> The Yank Federal Aviation Administration is in the process of creating
> a 'NextGen' system for the centralized control of US domestic aircraft.

As is Europe, China, India and even here in Australia.

'NextGen' is the dumbest name they could come up with: always likely to be put off for another generation to consider.

However, centralised control already exists, and it's not just US domestic aircraft, it all aircraft which fly over America. Sloppy reporting. Centralised control exists in most flight information regions in the world, including the two which Australia controls (11% of the Earth's surface, if you're interested).

> That is, replacing airport radar systems with satellites and computers.

No, it won't. And computers connect existing radar systems, both at airports and beyond airport boundaries. It's not simply 'satellites', either: there are systems in each plane which broadcast to other planes in the system, building a complete mesh of information.

> I guess you could say it will be a cloud based management system. Must
> say, I'm not entirely convinced I would want to fly through the clouds.

No, it isn't cloud-based. If ever there was a conservative environment which has to ensure that there are triple redundancies (and more), it's air traffic control. Cloud-based computing will only be considered when it is sufficiently established to offer business continuity. There's an important consideration here: the result of an outage is far, far more significant than a banking system outage, for example.

> Of course and as usual with ICT, things aren't going according to plan.

It's not an ICT project. It's far wider than this. There are people involved, and significant risks if not done properly.
> 
> http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-12-223
> 
> What GAO Found
> 
> "In a review of 30 major ATC acquisition programs, all of which will 
> contribute to the transition to NextGen, GAO found that costs for 11 of 
> the 30 programs have increased from their initial estimates by a total of 
> $4.2 billion and 15 programs experienced delays.

...and what it fails to mention is that Congress delayed all of the appropriation bills, hence a primary cause for both delays and cost overruns. 

If ever there was a case for spending a dollar now to save thousands in the future, this program is it. However, a government seen to be spending any money at all is considered an anathema to the American public, so they now wear the cost.

But you won't find this in the GAO report.

Are things different here? We will have to see. You'll only have to wait until 2018 to find out, by which time our system will be in place.

iT