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Best practices gained from NextGen deployment By Dorothy Ramienski Federal News Radio has been telling you about the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen), which promises to transform the nation's air transportation system in the 21st century. Currently, five federal agencies are involved in the planning and execution of the system: the Department of Commerce, DoD, DHS, FAA and NASA. Patricia Craighill is the assistant director for the NextGen Joint Planning & Development Office and explained how the system will take American aviation to 2025 and help it succeed beyond that. "The purpose of the program is to apply new technologies and the results of lots of research that's going on to the challenge of making our airspace more efficient while maintaining the tremendous levels of safety that FAA has always [had]." To do this, there is a great deal of information sharing going on, as well as an increased use of technology. "We'll be going from radar-based navigation to navigation that's based on GPS signals that the planes can get and transmit. So, rather than only talking to an air traffic controller, they're transmitting their position to the ground and other planes, so planes can have situational awareness of each other." There is also a new Concept of Operations plan, which Craighill touts as a visionary document for what airspace will look like as NextGen is rolled out. "It describes the ideal situation from now until 2025 and it identifies operational improvements that can be made along the way." From this document came the Integrated Work Plan, which codifies the operational improvements and defines enablers that need to occur before 2025. "What things have to be modified? What things have to be acquired? What decisions have to be made -- what policy decisions need to be made in order for those operational improvements to happen?" A NextGen community has developed within the five agencies that take part. Thus, FAA, DoD, DHS, Commerce and NASA have all found themselves having to work together when it comes to planning for 2025. "Part of this is being creative -- thinking creatively -- and having a real vision for what could be. As we execute our research and development plans and we learn from the experiments that we do, we adjust what we think is really feasible. At the same time, we have a division . . . that's doing business-case modeling of all the different aspects of NextGen and taking into consideration all of the constituents . . . so that we can make some critical decisions." She added that the models don't simply consider agency needs, rather, they take the private sector's concerns and wants into account, as well. "If it's going to cost this much, do we really want to implement it that way? Are there other ways to implement and get the same benefits without costing as much? There's a lot of that trade off work that goes on, and then that informs the Con-Ops and informs the Integrated Work Plan and we make adjustments." The overall goal is to implement a service-oriented architecture, which will hopefully keep everyone on the same page. "People who own data can publish their data to the architecture, and people who are interested in using data can discover data on the architecture. So, it becomes kind of a big smorgasbord of what's available. The beauty of that is that it fosters some creative thinking about -- if I had this data element and that data element and could put them together, what could I learn from that? What could I improve about our operations?'' Ultimately, Craighill said she hopes NextGen will be used as a model for other government projects on similar scales. "[The FAA] is really doing some groundbreaking work. What we're trying very hard to do is not duplicate efforts that are going on in other parts of the government where they're solving similar problems, but hopefully [we will] be able to benefit from those and pull it all together in a working model that we can then share with other agencies." (Archives) |