Later, in the cockpit of a brand-new JetBlue Airbus A321, I see how it simplifies things for the flight crew as well: A single button signals the tower they WILCO-will comply. Flight paths and course changes are based on navigation aids and waypoints put in place before many of the pilots using them were born.ĭata Comm, on the other hand, allows the controller to send a clearance directly to the cockpit, and to the airline’s dispatcher, with the push of a few buttons, taking a little more than 90 seconds. The daily flight from JFK to LAX rarely takes the direct path (green), as FlightRadar24 shows. “When that airplane is not moving, it’s a roadblock, it’s a Jersey barrier,” says Abraham. It’s a recipe for errors and cascading delays. All this can take 10 to 12 minutes, Abraham says, and all while the flight crew is taxiing and preparing the airplane for flight. Finally, they must then break through the crowded radio frequency to accept the clearance, a task made tougher for the many foreign operators for whom English is a second or third language. They then run the clearance by their airline’s operations center to make sure they have enough fuel to fly the new route. The flight crew must copy these down exactly, then repeat them back to the tower to ensure accuracy. Direct EMJAY, Echo, Mike, Juliet, Alpha, Yankee J174 Snowhill SWL, Sierra, Whiskey, Lima direct CEBEE, Charlie, Echo, Bravo, Echo, Echo…” and so on, in the example Abraham gives me. The tower controllers must then issue a new departure clearance to each of them, which can be a lengthy process as they spell out each navigation waypoint and route to ensure there’s no confusion: “JetBlue 353 cleared for Palm Beach airport, SKORR3 departure, Yankee transition, expect radar vectors to WAVEY, Whiskey, Alpha, Victor, Echo, Yankee. JFK handles some 800 departures a day, and when foul weather creeps in-to New York or to any other major airport, because airplanes leaving JFK are headed to destinations all over the world-dozens of aircraft on the taxiway can require last-minute changes to their flight plans.
You can have 100 routes into New York, but everybody has to line up eventually and land.” But no matter how you arrange airplanes in the sky, there’s a bottleneck at the end points, which is where Data Comm comes in, making the best use of what Abraham says is the scarcest resource in the airspace: “It’s the runway. Satellite-based surveillance, meanwhile, can give air traffic controllers-and other pilots-more accurate and timely location information than radar can, allowing aircraft to fly closer together. Satellite navigation can allow aircraft to fly smooth, efficient point-to-point routes rather than zigzagging between ground-based navigation beacons and stair-stepping to change altitudes.
Says Abraham: “Our ground controller-during a big thunderstorm even, there is no person busier in the FAA.”ĭata Comm is just one component in a vast and ambitious program, called NextGen (short for Next Generation Air Transportation), in which the Federal Aviation Administration is overhauling the way aircraft navigate and the way controllers track and communicate with them. Called Data Communications, or Data Comm, it represents a simple idea: Instead of transmitting complex clearance information between controllers and pilots over a crowded radio channel, why not send it directly to the airplane’s flight computers? This could speed up the clearance process when the controllers are dealing with problems. I was at JFK that frosty day for a demonstration of a new technology designed to keep things working well and voices low in the control tower. When there are pop-up thunderstorms or traffic jams on the taxiway, “there is cacophony back and forth across the tower.”
“When things don’t work well, there is definitely a different level of volume,” he says with a laugh. It’s not always like this, says Steve Abraham, a seasoned air traffic controller and local chapter president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. The only clue that a late-season snowstorm canceled more than 700 flights at this airport just two days earlier is the dirty slush still lining the streets of New York and the meltwater dripping from the bridges.Īt most airports, the morning’s air traffic volume would be considered exceptionally heavy, but in the top of JFK’s 18-story air traffic control tower, it’s business as usual, the four controllers speaking softly to one another and into their headsets. Kennedy International Airport in New York as jet after jet roars overhead, noses up, clawing its way into the air.
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