Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, September 18, 1995 TAG: 9509180156
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
The new system would employ satellites 11,000 miles above the Earth, sophisticated collision-avoidance gear in planes and data-link communications on the ground to keep aircraft safely apart in flight, allowing the FAA to scrap cumbersome, expensive and occasionally unreliable electronic gear that in some cases dates back to the 1950s.
But the most audacious part of the new concept would change who is responsible for keeping jetliners, private planes and military aircraft from bumping into one another as they hurtle through America's increasingly crowded skies.
The FAA, which employs 17,146 civilian air traffic control personnel at more than 650 facilities throughout the nation, wants to strip the controllers of the primary aircraft-separation responsibility during long-distance flights, giving that chore to the pilots.
``It's a revolution in the way we handle air traffic control,'' said George Donohue, an FAA associate administrator responsible for the development of new technologies. ``The pilots are better judges of what's safe than the controllers, because if a pilot fouls up, he's dead.'' But there are a couple of problems - the pilots say they don't want primary responsibility for aircraft separation, and the controllers say they want to keep it.
Not only that, the Air Line Pilots Association, which represents about 43,000 commercial airline pilots, and the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, representing 70 percent of the controllers, say switching the air traffic responsibilities to the pilots - already burdened with the demanding tasks of flying complex jetliners - may not work.
Some federal officials privately agree.
``If they ever try it, it's just going to be one hell of a mess out there,'' said a senior federal air safety official, speaking under a guarantee of anonymity. ``With all those pilots up there, there has to be a referee to keep them apart. And that referee has to be the air traffic controller on the ground.''
Despite the controversy, pilots, controllers, FAA bosses and air safety officials are in agreement on one thing - the current air traffic control system is in serious need of a major overhaul.
During the past year, long-range radar equipment used to guide jetliners cruising at high altitudes over the United States has faltered or failed completely a dozen times, including a failure last week in Illinois, often because of stuttering computer gear that dates back 25 years or more.
Newer systems, including a radar called the ASR-9 that was developed in 1989 to guide planes as they approach the nation's busiest airports, have been equally troubled. An ASR-9 at Huntsville, Ala., suffered 42 outages between 1990 and 1993, and two others in southern Florida went down a total of 29 times in June and July of this year, according to published reports.
Fortunately, backup systems usually provided controllers with some form of radar coverage.
by CNB