Editor in Chief Thomas B. Haines has been covering the general aviation industry for 15 years.
With a nudge of the sensitive joystick, the airplane symbol moves back into the center of the large, colorful cockpit display.
Ahead, flying at me from infinity, are a series of rectangular boxes. My goal: keep the airplane symbol inside the boxes as they pass by. If I do so, I will reach my next waypoint with the sort of precision only a computer can appreciate.
The concept of the Highway in the Sky (HITS) symbology has been around for decades and has been in use by the military for some time. We'll soon see it in general aviation cockpits. Avidyne, whose simulator I recently had the opportunity to fly, hopes to have its system certificated by the end of next year. Sierra Flight Systems is said to be close as well.
The new displays will replace the conventional attitude indicator with an electronic depiction of an always-VFR world — blue, cloudless skies and brown terrain. Actually, thanks to extensive terrain and obstruction databases now available, the terrain will not be a flat featureless plain. Instead, the systems will depict images of the actual terrain you are flying over, providing a tremendous sense of situational awareness. Add in weather information and traffic depictions and you will have completed the four pillars of situational awareness: positional, weather, terrain, and traffic awareness.
But, you might ask, how will I wedge such a large display in the hodgepodge panel of my 1950s CloudCruiser? In fact, you may not need to. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has recently been demonstrating a small device that fits on your head somewhat like a large pair of glasses. A screen hangs in front of one eye and projects flight profile data onto your retina. It weighs only a few ounces and could conceivably plug into the panel. Of course, somewhere behind the panel you'll need the equipment to run the system.
Regardless of exactly how all of this unfolds, you can bet that the guy at NASA who is overseeing the development of all of this stuff is watching to make sure that it is practical for general aviation cockpits and budgets. That guy is Sam Venneri, NASA's chief technologist and associate administrator for aerospace technology. He's on our side because he's one of us. The owner of a Mooney, he flies several hundred hours a year and does his own annual inspections under the supervision of an A&P technician. He is adamant about using the Mooney for business flights up to about 1,200 nm because he has calculated that at that distance his flights are competitive with airline flights on a door-to-door basis.
Venneri and several of his staff members recently visited AOPA to brief us on all the agency is doing to refocus efforts on the first "A" in NASA, an effort NASA Administrator Dan Goldin has championed since he took the helm of the agency almost a decade ago. You may — or may not — find it hard to believe, but there are those in government who believe that we know all there is to know about aeronautics and we should therefore expend efforts and funding only on space applications. It reminds me of those forward-thinkers in the late 1800s who recommended closing the U.S. Patent Office because they believed there was nothing left to invent.
Part of Venneri's job centers on technologies that will lead to a more efficient air traffic control system and more fuel-efficient, quieter, lighter, and safer airliners.
Someday some of those technologies will trickle down to general aviation, but in the shorter term, Venneri and his staff have been interested in making general aviation an integral part of the nation's transportation system. Noting that 80 percent of airline enplanements occur at less than 1 percent of the nation's 5,400 airports, Venneri says the time is right for establishing a more distributed air transportation system that takes advantage of the many underutilized airports. Such a system will lead to "an era of unconstrained air mobility," according to NASA.
But before we can fully leverage those underutilized airports and fill the skies with a larger fleet of personal aircraft, many changes must occur, Venneri acknowledges. To help lay the groundwork for the changes, NASA has established the Small Aircraft Transportation System (SATS) — a plan with the goal of reducing door-to-door travel time by half in 10 years and two-thirds in 25 years; and to reduce transcontinental travel time by half within 25 years.
NASA has received $69 million in funding for a five-year proof-of-concept phase in which technologies will be conceived and evaluated. At the end of 2005, go/no-go decisions will be made on the technologies, with system development and deployment occurring over the following 20 years.
The agency justifies the need for the investment by noting that the air traffic system is currently near saturation. Even with planned ATC improvements, the current hub-and-spoke airline system will surpass available demand in 2008, and that's not counting as-yet unimagined uses for air transportation.
Better utilization of existing runways outside the airline hub airports can more evenly distribute the load and provide for a more efficient transportation system. In the future, the majority of people will still travel through large airports, but a significant minority will be able to take advantage of direct flights to smaller airports nearer their intended destinations. Before that can happen, more of the airports must have better all-weather capabilities. Currently, only 715 airports — 13 percent — have instrument landing systems. ILSs are expensive to install and maintain and inflexible in their design. To truly leverage the airports, a more flexible system is needed.
One of the SATS five-year goals is to "demonstrate key airborne technologies for precise guided accessibility in small aircraft in near-all-weather conditions to virtually any small airport in nonradar, nontowered airspace." To accomplish this, the agency must come up with a way to change the air traffic system to allow the integration of a greater number of light airplanes on short notice, provide those airplanes with more efficient routings, and allow them to operate independently, but safely, in nonradar, nontowered airspace. In the cockpit, the HITS displays combined with terrain, weather, and traffic sensors go a long way toward giving the pilot the tools necessary for flights in the en route and terminal airspace of the future. Still to come are navigation sensors with the reliability and accuracy for flying three-dimensional guided approaches to virtually any runway. The wide area augmentation system (WAAS), which enhances GPS position information, offers the level of accuracy most of us need.
As it stands now, WAAS will not offer minimums as low as conventional ILS approaches. However, WAAS-enhanced approaches will provide minimums lower than existing nonprecision approaches and with enough flexibility to be implemented at most airports. Just as important, few if any changes will be necessary at the airports themselves. Airport owners will not need to purchase extensive amounts of land to create a clear zone for a long, straight-in approach.
In fact, NASA believes that on-board systems with knowledge of nearby terrain and obstructions and other traffic might be able to create instrument approach procedures on the fly. Under the scenario, a pilot arriving at an airport might fly an approach generated at that moment by his on-board systems based on the local terrain and the location and speed of other nearby aircraft. Currently, in a nonradar, nontowered environment, only one aircraft can operate at a time. NASA's goal is to allow 10 aircraft to operate near such an airport at once. But if in the end only two aircraft can operate, it's still a doubling of existing capacity.
AOPA's objective is to make sure that the air traffic and navigation system of the future does not require expensive hardware for aircraft that won't benefit from it. To that end, aircraft flown only VFR shouldn't have to equip with black boxes or displays not necessary for that flight environment. Likewise, all of the development should be done with an eye on the needs and budget of a general aviation pilot. We'll be watching and you can bet that Sam Venneri will be, too, as he eyes the panel of his own Mooney.
E-mail the author at [email protected].
