Check 6 Revisits: A Grand Canyon Crash And Its Impact On Aviation Safety

With air traffic control (ATC) modernization in sharp focus, Aviation Week editors and former FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt dig back through our archives to June 1956. A midair collision above the Grand Canyon would spur the formation of FAA and spark much-needed change to an aging ATC system that could no longer keep up with the demands of the day.

Check 6 Revisits delves into Aviation Week's more than 100-year archive. Subscribers can explore our archive here and read key Aviation Week articles related to this episode here:

• The Air Traffic Control Problem (Hotz editorial, August 1955)
• One Step Toward Better Air Traffic Control (Hotz editorial, December 1955)
• Toward Better Air Traffic Control (Hotz editorial, April 1958)

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AI-Generated Transcript

Christine Boynton: Welcome to Check 6 Revisits, where we comb through more than a century of Aviation Week and Space Technology archives. On this podcast, our editors explore pivotal industry moments and achievements of the past while considering how they might relate to the events of today. I'm your host, Christine Boynton, Aviation Week's senior editor for Air Transport, and today we'll start at the Grand Canyon in June 1956.

 

Radio Presenter: This first interview is the first interview made with Cecil Richardson, the Coconino County sheriff, with his first statement to the press that the TWA plane had been cited. This interview was made direct from the sheriff's office on Saturday night, July 30, 1956.

Jack Murphy: This is Jack Murphy reporting from the Coconino County Sheriff's Office in Flagstaff on the passenger plane crash that occurred in northern Arizona this morning. Reports have been coming into the sheriff's office constantly and have been checked out thoroughly by Coconino County Sheriff Cecil Richardson, who we have here on our phone line. Now, sheriff, could you indicate what the latest reports are and the location of those reports?

Cecil Richardson: The records of at least one of the airliners at TWA has been found on the south slope of what's called, that's our latest information, and that is just a little west and south of the junction of the Little Colorado River and the Big Colorado River. And it will be hard to get to it. You'll have to go in by probably with helicopters in the morning.

Jack Murphy: Sheriff, how close do you think that your, where you send the ground party in there tonight or will you wait until daylight?

Cecil Richardson: You'll have to wait until daylight because it too rough to send someone in now—check with the helicopters in the morning. And then based on the rest of the tip that is down in there on their report.

Jack Murphy: This branch area has been pointed out as actually being inside the Grand Canyon National Park. Is that correct sheriff?<\/p>

Cecil Richardson: As far as we know it inside the Grand Canyon National Park.

Christine Boynton: What you've just heard is an interview with the Coconino County sheriff following a midair collision between a United Airlines DC-7 and a TWA Super Constellation. All 128 aboard both aircraft were killed. It is perhaps the most well-known in a series of midair collisions around that time that would spur much-needed change. The prior fall, a series of Aviation Week editorials had warned that midair collisions could be the consequence of what it dubbed “a lethal combination,” that is, an antiquated air traffic control system and the increases in both speed and density of modern air traffic. For a little perspective between the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938 and 1955, the number of airline passengers went from about one and a half million to more than 41 million. Post-war years gave us airports, airfields and pilots causing air traffic to spike. Then the jet age added a much more technically capable aircraft to the fleet.

This was all within about a decade and laid on top of an aging ATC system. Following another midair crash in April 1958, the fifth such in three years, then-Aviation Week editor-in-chief Bob Hotz took stock of what actions had been taken toward much-needed modernization and what had hindered progress. Hotz wrote “What congressional critics and executive planners too often failed to appreciate is the inexorable time lag between decisions on action aimed at solving these air safety problems and the time when equipment is developed, procured and installed, and men are adequately trained to operate it both on the ground and in the air.” He pointed to “years of executive indifference and congressional reluctance to appropriate money as having stalled vital actions.” In late 1958 with a series of collisions spurring action, a new independent FAA was formed and tasked with civil aviation safety. So there's a lot to unpack here. And joining me today to do so, are Aviation Week senior editors, Bill Carey and Sean Broderick. Also joining us today is Randy Babbitt, who brings a really unique perspective to today's chat. Four hats really, as a former pilot, union leader, FAA administrator and U.S. airline executive. So, welcome Randy, and thanks for joining us today.

Randy Babbitt: Well, thank you. Thank you for having me.

Christine Boynton: So I kicked us off with a very high level-overview, but Bill, can you maybe get into the Grand Canyon crash with a little bit more depth? How did that happen?

Bill Carey: Sure. And it's great to be here with former FAA administrator, Randy Babbitt, and my friend and colleague Sean Broderick. So Christine, you opened with the 1956 midair collision over the Grand Canyon. This was in the post-World War II era during the Eisenhower administration when air traffic control was primarily conducted by radar and radio communications with pilots. But as Hotz warned about, there was a growth in both the density of air traffic and the speed at which aircraft operated, including the coming introduction of jets into the civil aviation fleet. But anyway, this collision resulted in the deaths of 128 people onboard both airliners. Both had taken off from Los Angeles International Airport that morning, only three minutes apart. The TWA flight was to Kansas City, that departed first and initially routed north, while the United flight to Chicago initially routed south, their flightpaths were planned to cross near the Grand Canyon. And as the Kansas City flight routed back south and Chicago flight routed back north, although the flight plans called for the flightpaths to cross, the planned altitudes differed by 2,000 feet. However, the flights both ended up at an altitude of 21,000 feet when they collided over the Grand Canyon. This is according to an FAA history, the FAA has a great historical page on their website, which I would recommend the probable cause finding of that accident by the Civil Aeronautics Board in April of 1957 in the civil, the CAB was the predecessor of today's NTSB and it was an independent agency within the Commerce Department, was that the pilots, this is a quote, did not see each other in time to avoid the collision. And then it goes on to say there were intervening clouds reducing the time for visual separation, visual limitations due to cockpit visibility, preoccupation with normal cockpit duties, preoccupation with matters unrelated to cockpit duties such as attempting to give passengers a more scenic view of the Grand Canyon physiological limits to human vision.

And I think last but not least, which is cogent to our discussion today, is the insufficiency of en route air traffic advisory information due to inadequacy of facilities and lack of personnel and air traffic control. That was the summary of the probable cause finding the Civil Aeronautics Board in April 1957.

Christine Boynton: Sean, what else was going on around time?

Sean Broderick: Sure. So I think part of the real core of that accident was the lack of positive air traffic control of the two airplanes and at least one of, I think it was the TWA flight was flying what was called an IFR on top clearance. And I think Randy can probably help us a lot more with this. He's probably flown one or two in his life, but basically it was so they were not under radar control. And if you fly an IFR on top clearance, that meant you were flying IFR procedures. But you could do it in VFR conditions, which means you did not necessarily have to stick to the altitude that you were assigned. And I believe they were flying an IFR 1,000 on top, which basically meant their altitude was going to vary by a thousand feet plus or minus. And again, Randy, correct me on that one and the part that Bill talked about through the Grand Canyon, getting the view of the Grand Canyon apparently a very common thing back then. And so you put those two things together and what you have is basically two airplanes flying roughly along the same route. They were going over the same unofficial waypoint, which is the canyon. They didn't see each other and because there was no mechanism in place besides the pilot's ability to look out the window and avoid each other, and that's sort of what happened. Ray and Randy, you wanted to throw something in, but yeah, please correct me if I'm wrong on either of those points on top clearances.

Randy Babbitt: No, that's accurate. I don't think, I haven't heard that phrase in a long time, but it was,

Sean Broderick: There's a reason for that at the time. So at the thing that struck me when going through the old issues of the magazine and some of these reports to prepare for this podcast was, and both of you have already touched on this Christina bill, the pace of change that was going on at the time in the industry, and just for perspective's sake, if you take 1956 is where we started. If you go back two decades to the late thirties, so 1936, there wasn't even an independent agency to overseeing air safety or air route development or anything. It wasn't until 1938 that Civil Aeronautics authority was created. So aviation was under the Commerce Department. If you do that today, 20 years ago, we were at the beginning of NextGen. So if you think about, we've been talking about the same modernization program for two decades. You go back 20 years from that Grand Canyon collision, there wasn't even an agency to manage a modernization program, but it changed very quickly.

It doesn't mean that there weren't efforts or at least calls beyond the pages of Aviation Week and Space Technology's editorial to make these changes, but there were some interruptions there. So 1938, the Civil Aeronautics Act came around, and that didn't even last long. President Roosevelt in 1940 split the CAA into two agencies. And a lot of people forget this. Civil Aeronautics Authority was ATC and Airways development and the CAB Civil Aeronautics Board, which we sort of think as the precursor to the FAA, even though they really both were was safety and economic regulation. Then you hit World War II and as Bill talked about, and in the English you did too, Christine, the pace of development on aircraft technology and pilot training and some of the things that we've become important in air traffic control really took off. But none of that was applied to civil aviation flying until after the war.

So you get to 1946 and you have airlines that want to continue. The airlines did very well during the war because they worked for the Department of Defense or they worked in support of the war effort. They get back out, they're beginning to, they have pilots, they have people that want to travel, they have new airfields, new aircraft in development, and they had a military that was used to controlling the airspace because if you remember how we got into World War II, it was arguably partially an air defense failure. So very quickly it became clear that all of the stakeholders at the time, and that was for better or for worse, the Departments of Commerce, Department of the Navy, the Post Office, the War Department, and the State Department and the Civil Aeronautics Board, they were all told to get together on something called the Air Coordinating Committee.

And the Air Coordinating Committee very quickly determined that they needed some expertise to figure out how to handle the emerging air traffic control technology or modernization challenge. So they handed or they requested or that task ended up in the hands of a group called the Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics, which still exists today and we know it as RTCA. They were tasked with studying air traffic expansion and how to best manage it. Special committee 31 RTCA recommended a specific air traffic control system using technologies VHF VOR and DME as the primary navigation system, which again was new back then. And they also looked at how computers were developing sort of in parallel with the aviation industry and said, computers are going to be very important for managing terminal area traffic. And this would become over the preceding 12 years, the terminal area issue would become huge, but would be one that wasn't dealt with as quickly as route and even air traffic control towers.

So Bill talked about what happened in the fifties. The first airport to use radars for departure and arrivals early fifties was National. And LaGuardia at LaGuardia departure control or arrival controls by controllers tripled arrival rates to 15 aircraft per hour. That was tripled with the technology. So you think about again, where we were, that led to one of the editorials that Bill referenced where our esteemed editor called the Air Traffic control system, a DC-3 era system, air traffic control system that was insufficient and really a safety hazard. So when that accident happened, there was another key study that was going on that really was the catalyst for forming what we have today. President Eisenhower at this time picked a retired World War I flying ace and Army Air Corps major general named Ted Curtis to become what was called the special assistant to the president of Aviation Facilities Planning.

And his job, he had, well, he had given a couple of tasks, but the most important one for our conversation was to determine the direction and coordination of a long range study of the nation's requirements for aviation facilities. So Curtis was in the middle of this study when the Grand Canyon accident happened. So in April 1957, he fast tracked what he was doing, so circle the calendar to April because that's the pace I guess of some of that stuff back then. He submitted an interim report and it had a couple of key recommendations and one of them was to develop a new bureau to manage air navigation facilities to develop them. And within four months that became law. A year later we had the Federal Aviation Act 1958, which created the FAA and that really got us going to where we are today. It's amazing. If you look at the Curtis report though, even some of the other, they knew how fast things were going.

If you look at some of the numbers that he had, he expected by 1975, there would be 70 billion revenue passenger miles up from 20 billion in 1956. The actual figure is 75 is 163 billion private aircraft. There were 61,000. When he wrote his report, he figured there'd be over a hundred thousand by 75, actually over 200,000. So they understood the rate of growth then, but it was going to get even worse or even not worse, more acute. So it was in the middle of all that this accident happened, and there were, I think three other major midair collisions, including one over in New York in 1960 that were really the catalyst for changing not only some of these things that were lacking, but also adding terminal area control. And the one in 1960 put in things that you would think we take for granted now but weren't in place back then.

Things like speed restrictions in the terminal area around airports. We think about how quickly the jet, the DC-6, DC-7 and then DC-8, how quickly the jet age came, 707. You didn't have to think about those speeds when you were developing air traffic control procedures in the 1940s and even early fifties. But by 1960s, you tell somebody to approach a fix or slow down and you're going to have aircraft flying at very, very different speeds. Again, something probably Randy can speak to. So that's the environment we were in, and some parts of it were moving incredibly fast and other parts were moving glacially until this series of accidents happened that that 1956 midair was right in the middle of.

Christine Boynton: Well, thanks, Sean. Randy, you've had the opportunity to experience air traffic control, as I mentioned, sort of with wearing four hats right over the years, and you started as a pilot with Eastern Airlines. And I am wondering if you can kind of give us your perspective on air traffic control challenges and air traffic control just in general as you've moved throughout your career in those different positions, maybe starting as a pilot.

Randy Babbitt: Sure. Well, and I think Sean did a great job of setting the benchmark and taking this forward. I started flying for Eastern Airlines about 10 years after that accident. We had radar, you had flight plans, you still were doing some of the basics that visual aircraft would fly at odd altitudes plus 500 feet going one direction and even altitudes and 500 in another. And ironically, people find this hard to believe, but in the sixties, your obligation to file a flight plan was limited on the weather. If the weather was bad, you had to file an instrument flight plan. If the weather was nice, you didn't have to, you could fly visually and you could cancel. And people, now of course, jets are required, but over time these things changed and you could just cancel your flight plan if the weather was good, just canceled and just go direct and save time, save fuel.

And obviously as time has gone on, accidents, unfortunately, it's like the stoplight at the school. You have to have an incident with children or something, then you put up the stop sign, then you put up the crossing guard, then you do, well, you had a terrible crash in San Diego and that changed your ability to just cancel and go of visual and mean everyone. You will maintain your IFR separation. You'll stay under those rules. Then we change the speeds you get down below. That change came about probably, I'm going to say she probably knows better than I do, but I'm going to say somewhere around 1970 below 10,000 feet, you had to fly below 250 knots. 250 knots was slower. Up until that point you could come into the Atlanta area going 350 knots and I mean at 2,000 feet. It was crazy. And so each one of those takes a piece, a piece, a piece, making it better separation.

The problem that we've seen, I think twofold is every generation of aircraft gets more sophisticated. They're faster, they do other things, but we don't have the air traffic control system modernizing at the same rate. It is not a system that's adaptable to evolution. In other words, we'll just change a few things. It'll just keep betting better every year. No, you pour concrete and this is the system you're going to have for the next five years period. And if you want to change it, then we'll do something and it'll take two or three years. And people think it's a modern system. Christine, I might've told you one of my early chuckles was taking Secretary Pena on a tour of one of the radar facilities up in O'Hare. And he was just fascinated the big green scopes and aircraft. And he just thought this was fascinating. And he said, wow, this is just so modern. This is just incredible. And I looked at him, I booked up and I said, with all due respect, Mr. Secretary, when was the last time you saw the word UNIVAC written on something? And that's how old it was. I mean, this is aged stuff.

And we still have facilities that I think a few left depending on some systems that require vacuum tubes. I mean, so we've got to a decide what is a better system and how we're going to do it, but it has to be built so that it can evolve as technology, the leaps and bounds. Will AI come into air traffic control? I'm sure it will. I mean, it's got to be tested, got to. A lot of things will happen, but it will get there and it will get better. But we need to have systems that evolve. And then the other side, and having worn a couple of the hats you mentioned, people would say, well, the FAA should have done this. Well, who's the decision maker here? The FAA says we want to do this. And the Department of Transportation says, no. No. Politically we can't do that.

So too much money. Oh, really? So you can't decide? No, because well actually Congress decides they decide how much money. So at the end of the day, the group that gets blamed for everything, it's a group that may have been screaming for years. You need more money to fix the system and you have to appropriate it, and it has to go through channels and it takes time. So hopefully, I mean, we've made such tremendous improvements in air safety. I mean, I remember one of the folks think Gilman had a statistic that I really enjoyed that we used to measure accident rates, the hull losses by a hundred thousand hours. And if we had the hull loss rate today that we had in 1970, we would lose an aircraft every three weeks.

Speaker 4: Wow.

Randy Babbitt: That's how much we've improved. And we went 13 years, but not one accident. So it's a pretty remarkable change. So can it get better? Yes. And does it need to get better? Absolutely. And we have the technology, we just need to embrace it, fund it, and move on. And we can't get behind like we did here. I appreciate COVID and laying people off and everything, but when you lay somebody off, they're gone in a week. If you say, I want 'em back, it's two years. It's two years a controller from the day you hire 'em. And that's not somebody when I be somebody train, maybe they could be the tower operator at OA Airport or something, but they're not going to fair approach control or Atlanta not with two years. And so it takes a long time for these skills to build up. Unfortunately, I think we're moving in the right direction. I think we've got some new avenues to train controllers more quickly, better in the mill, but still it does require careful attention to staying up to date and staying modernized and staying ahead of the curve.

Christine Boynton: And Randy, I think you did a lot to advocate for NextGen and to try to move that effort forward. And I wonder if you can, I know you kind of touched on this a little bit about decision makers, but what are some of the challenges when you're trying to move a modernization or a transformation through this system?

Randy Babbitt: Yeah, there's clearly some challenges. First of all, the aircraft in the sky are not at the same level of sophistication. So you take the most modern Airbus or the most modern Boeing right now, those aircraft know so much about themselves. All the electronics that's on board and how they communicate, what they can communicate to whom they can communicate are state-of-the-art. But they may be flying next to someone's private jet that's 12 years old. It doesn't have any of that equipment on board. It doesn't have the same stuff. So we saw that originally with ADS-B, the Automated Dependent Surveillance Broadcast System, which allows you to see other aircraft and they can see you. It tells air traffic control where you are with a lot of data. And so we said, well, everybody should get that. Well, that's great, except if you own a Cessna 172 that you paid $40,000 for and it's still over your VFR and somebody says you need a $25,000 piece of equipment, that's going to be a problem.

And I mean, even if you've got a $200,000, $300,000 airplane, somebody says you need a $40,000 piece of equipment, that's it out of reach. And so what do you do then? You just don't allow them in the airspace best equipped, best served as an old phrase. And if you had the equipment, you can come in here. If you don't have it, you can't get away with without in Atlanta and O'Hare. But a lot of airports, people want to go in and out of those airports and they can't afford the equipment. So now the good news is the advancements in technology and microchips and all that stuff, the equipment is getting less expensive and better, but still you've got to design a system that works on all the aircraft in the air traffic control system, and yet all those aircraft aren't equipped at the same level.

Christine Boynton: That's a good segue. Bill. I wonder if you could kind of bring us up to speed on some of what's been done in recent years to modernize air traffic control and what technologies we're working on. I know we just did another podcast a few weeks ago, but maybe you could give us a good summary here.

Bill Carey: Sure. So fast forward from 1956 to 2003, Congress passed the Vision 100-Century of Aviation Act, which established a joint planning and development office, which combined the FAA and I believe NASA was a part of that and other federal agencies. In 2004, the JPDO produced the Next Generation Air Transportation System Integrated Plan, otherwise known as NextGen, which is kind of the paradigm that our air traffic control system has been evolving through ever since the early 2000s. I guess I would kind of try to describe the progress of that effort along the lines of communications, navigation, surveillance, and then the categories of automation. And another project of NextGen was SWIM the System Wide Information Management System in the category of communications, the FAA implemented what's known as Data Comm, and that's the ability for text messaging between pilots and controllers. And everything I've heard from both sides, from both pilots and controllers is that they really like Data Comm.

So according to the FAA's NextGen annual report of 2024, Data Comm has been rolled out to, it started in 2016 with Tower Service and the use of text messaging for departure clearances, and it's now currently available at 65 different airports and it's being deployed to the en route centers. There's 20 air route traffic control centers across the country, and I believe all but two of them now have been equipped for Data Comm with an increased message set for route clearances and things like that. So what that does is it's much more efficient communication between pilots and controllers that eliminates any misunderstanding or congestion on VHF radio channels. And it's basically uploading messages right to a flight management system for the pilots to read. So both sides of that equation really like Data Comm and the area of navigation, the FAA designed a number of performance-based navigation departures and arrivals at runway ends across the country.

I don't have a number on that, but it's in the hundreds at least. And it's enabled by the Wide Area Augmentation System, which is the FAA's satellite-based system for correcting GPS signals down to much more precision than you get as a consumer with your driving directions. And then on surveillance, and Randy spoke about ADS-B automatic dependent surveillance broadcast that was, and we spoke about this on the podcast we just did recently. There's something on the order of 65-70 radio stations across the continental U.S. that enable ADS-B, which is the automatic broadcast of aircraft's position and other information both to the ground and to other aircraft if they're equipped to be able to accept that information through the process known as ADS-B In there isn't an Achilles heel to ADS-B and as Randy said, everybody's got to be equipped for the system to work.

I mean, if you have a Cessna 172 that's not broadcasting its position once per second and air traffic control may not be aware of it via radar or the pilot may be flying VFR, then it's more or less invisible to the system. So that's a bit of an Achilles heel to ADS-B. However, the FAA did require that anybody, all aircraft flying in controlled airspace be equipped to broadcast their position by ADS-B as of January of 2020. Then in the category of automation, the FAA over the course of this program known as NextGen, they installed the En Route Automation Modernization automation platform and en route centers according to the 2024 report. I'm just looking at this quickly. ERAM has at the 20 en route centers since 2015, and its hardware and software receiving upgrades, enhancements to its conflict probe and trajectory remodeling capabilities were completed last year, 2024.

And the flight plan processing capabilities scheduled to be updated this year. And then at the approach control centers, the TRACONs is equipped with a different automation system, and this is part of the problem we're currently facing because they don't necessarily talk to each other, and that's known as the STARS Automation platform. That's what the approach control controllers use. It's a very capable system built by Raytheon and it's equipped all across the FAA's TRACONs as well as some DOD approach control facilities because that was a joint procurement. Then I mentioned telecommunications, and this too comes into play in the current discussion. There's currently a contract underway, the FENS contract, the FAA Enterprise Network Systems contract that was awarded to Verizon, that's a 15-year contract, and that's meant to replace the FAA's telecommunications infrastructure. And I believe the FAA telecommunications infrastructure is currently a program of L3Harris.

And the issue there is it's kind of a backbone built on copper wires, and that's leading to some of the difficulties I'm sure we'll discuss later in this podcast. The SWIM system, the FAA System Wide Information Management System, it's a software-based service-oriented architecture in which other stakeholders in aviation can subscribe to that and exchange information. With the FAA, I'm looking at SWIM, there's more than 200 services that are available via the SWIM network. And there's, according to the FAA, 51 internal and external organizations now produce data that is published to SWIM that everybody who subscribes to the network has access to. That was an accomplishment of NextGen. And I don't know if this was strictly, and Randy could correct me considered a NextGen program, but just on an organizational basis, the FAA reorganized in June of 2023 to spin off its air traffic control piece to what's known as the Air Traffic Organization, and that's considered a performance-based organization in the first CEO or COO, I'm sorry, chief operating officer, that was Russell Chew back in 2003.

The current ATO head, who I believe I've read, I think Reuters has reported as leaving is Tim Arel with the FAA Air Traffic Organization. So these are some of the things that were done during this program called NextGen. And just coincidentally, at the end of the year as a result of the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 NextGen as a program is being sunsetted, this work is not going to disappear, but it's being outsourced to other pieces of the FAA and as of the end of this year, what is known as the NextGen office is being closed.

Here is the reviewed transcript with corrections according to AP Style:

Christine Boynton: So Secretary Duffy in May outlined a plan for an ATC modernization going forward. We detailed that plan in a previous episode of Check 6, and as you noted in that episode, Bill, the January 29th midair collision of a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter and an American Eagle CRJ on approach to Washington Reagan National really sent shock waves across the industry in general public and motivated the current retrospective of the ATC system. We've written a few pieces about these events over the last weeks and months and the plan going forward, and we've had a few reader letters come in from folks who have some familiarity with these systems. So I'm hoping to get kind of our reactions, our perspective on the plan, including you, Randy, and also Sean. I think you have some excerpts of those reader letters to share with us.

Sean Broderick: Well, so there are a couple of things, and I'll pull Randy back into this again. He has firsthand experience. So I think there's two reactions to the plan to develop a brand new air traffic control system by the end of 2028. The first one is from a pragmatic standpoint, if you're talking about things like replacing copper wires with fiber, if you're replacing things, you're upgrading things from a technical standpoint that will bring more reliability. There's some feasibility in that, but anytime you're adding new better, even if it's better technology for better procedures, anything like that is going to require new controller training. It's going to require maybe some equipage, it's going to require pilot training, and that is a whole different level of modernization. So when we're talking about this, I think it's important to sort of split those. If you look at the request for information that the FAA put out June 3rd, I think it was, it's mostly the former. It's mostly looking to swap older things with newer things that hopefully will bring more reliability. Will that help? Sure, it will it change fundamentally the way air traffic is controlled and airlines manage their operations, it won't. And I've had several readers that have chimed in even well before this issue came up, said they have said the biggest issue that we have is that we don't utilize all of the capabilities in terms of things like required navigation performance, as capable as it can possibly be, even if you're retrofitting older airplanes.

We don't take a dynamic routing three and four D dynamic routing. So an airplane gets onto the taxiway at this time and you're looking at everything that's happening between where that airplane is and where it's going and you're making adjustments along the way. It's possible, but it requires a shift. And like Randy said, and Bill said, it requires everybody to be on the same page. So one thing I wanted to ask Randy about how much does industry, whether it's the airlines or maybe pilots, how much can they influence the progress or lack thereof of an initiative that's going to bring a major change to either procedures or equipment?

Randy Babbitt: It is a great question. The carriers, I mean fundamentally, let's just cut to the chase the carriers. Anytime you can lower the en route time, you're talking fuel, you're talking engine time, you're off crew time, you're talking. So if you can take five minutes off of every flight, the airlines would be all for it. Now how much is that going to cost? Is it going to be offset by, well, we saved all this money, but we spent a fortune saving five minutes. So you've got to find that balance. I think there's a number of groups that I think have done a good job. You go through the alphabets, whether the NBAA, ALPA, these groups, I think they put folks in there that are clearheaded and they understand the systems and they're trying to get to the right goal from it. But you do see some resistance, a lot of training involved, a lot of equipage involved, and you don't just snap your fingers one night, we were doing this up until Sunday at midnight and then Monday we're going to start doing it completely different.

It's going to be a transition as you shift over to it. Typically, you see a lot of the innovations, especially in the post control world, take place at the Kennedys, at the O'Hares, at Atlantas, the busy, busy places where the ability to move traffic, look at the departure routes out of Atlanta is just a breathtaking, the five different runways they disperse themselves. Those are big steps in the right direction that allows a lot more traffic to move. But again, the other side is not going to be cheap and it's got to be evolving. I mean, I still chuckle when I look. You look at where the air traffic control centers and where visuals, we had VOR stations and everything, they're the same places. The bonfires were for the air mail pilots. These are ancient and nobody has moved them. Come on. There's more efficient ways to get from A to B and we don't need a point on the ground.

You could take an airplane today, a sophisticated airplane could take off in Kennedy and file a flight plan that has no regard with anything on the ground. It's going to go to the best altitude, it's going to find the best wind. It's going to find everything to optimize the best route. It can fly the fastest least amount of fuel between A and B. And does it go over all of these stations? No, it doesn't need to. Does it now? Yes, it does. Yeah, we've got to give up on that. We've got to go to the original. NextGen thinking was almost free flight, right? You just go and you'd have the best route and you say, well, everybody can't do that. Well, in today's computer world, yes, you can. We'll separate you. And the beauty of that type of separation is you've got two airplanes a thousand miles apart, you're going to cross somewhere, change one of them, one knot, and you got the clearance.

You don't have to put 'em in a holding pattern while this one goes by. You can change speeds or change altitudes for 200 miles, just climb up a thousand feet and then come back down or back up or all of this is possible. But again, and how that happens, maybe you're going to say that can happen from 31,000 feet and above and you got to have the equipment to do it and best served or be best equipped, but that's how it's going to get introduced, I think, into the system that you're going to have some boundaries that the more sophisticated equipment, the navigation capabilities on the airplane coupled with traffic control, ability to monitor and provide the separation all have to come together. So it could be done, but it's out there a ways. And 2028, let's hope.

Bill Carey: You mentioned free flight, Randy, I think even before NextGen, that term was coined. We were talking about free flight where pilots could choose their own optimal routings and kind of self navigate and air traffic control was just needed to land airplanes basically.

Randy Babbitt: That's right. I mean the idea would be if you just let the airplanes, I chuckle that we still put balloons up in the air every six hours or something that's all collapsed, every airplane. Well, I know Southwest and I'm certain that it's true at United, at Delta, the airplanes, I mean they know exactly where they are. They know all the effect of the wind on them. They know precisely what the temperature is, that wind direction. All of this is available right now, not what it was four hours ago right now, and the ability to put this information into a package to help people better flight plan, you could do it within your carriers, but we'll eventually get to the system where everybody's going to have access to that data and you're going to file a flight plan and you'll know if a butterfly crosses your path, it'll gust that sensitive, but it's capable. We just have to have the equipment that will optimize the capture of the data and the use of the data to the effect and best end.

Sean Broderick: I don't think that that is all coming by 2028, just to be clear.

Christine Boynton: Yeah, what is a realistic timeline? We talk about all these pieces coming together.

Sean Broderick: I mean, before you can set a timeline, I think you have to have a plan, and I don't think we have a plan, and I think that we have other ancillary issues that don't necessarily directly relate to air traffic control, but that have an influence. Randy mentioned Southwest. If you're a Southwest Airlines fleet planner and you are looking at what I need to equip by aircraft with for something that's coming in, let's say there was a deadline of 2025, something relevant, they would've said, okay, we're going to have a bunch of 737 Max 7s and a bunch of Max 8s with this stuff on it. We're not going to have to put it on our seven on all of these 30 or 50 or 80. And Christine this because you cover all these 737-700s because they're going to retire. Well, lo and behold, we have what's been going on with Boeing and airplanes are supposed to be certified and delivered four or five years ago are still neither.

And so you're sitting there at Southwest Airlines and you've got all these airplanes that no longer can do what they were supposed to be able to do. I mean, think about the ADS-B deadline that Bill talked about so that if you're looking forward, something like that just becomes another thorn. But I think the bigger picture is getting agreement on what does everyone need and who is everyone? Does everyone include business aviation? Do we exclude the GA people? What do you do at airports where you have all that sort of mixed traffic? I think it's a big challenge. And one thing we tend to forget in this country is our general aviation population, and you don't have even the other countries that are first world with better ATC systems and all that, they don't have near the GA influencer size that we have. There are some, but I mean it's not even comparable. And so you have to at least factor that in. Does it become a limiting issue for the airlines? That's certainly above my pay grade would make for interesting stories to write. But those are all factors that complicate our situation a little more than some other situations, at least in my view.

Bill Carey: I spoke to a regional vice president with NATCA, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, and this question did come up, what can be accomplished in the three to four year timeline that the Trump administration has laid out for this? And he said the two biggest things that he would recommend are to fix the FAA's telecommunications infrastructure to fast track that conversion from copper wires to fiber and the use of internet protocol as the data exchange. And two, something the administration is doing is to supercharge the hiring of air traffic controllers. Again, this is a NATCA perspective, but those are the two kind of pillars that they would recommend to make this happen at least within the next three or four years. Just

Randy Babbitt: A side note, one thing that is helping them greatly, there's now approval. There's about 70 schools colleges in the United States that belong to AT-CTI, which gives them, you can train there and you get a reduction in your flight time to get your ATP, but those schools are now getting approved to have controllers training, and you can take somebody who you got to go to college anyway and hey, I like that idea. You leave there, you are literally ready to go start in a basic tower. I mean a very simple tower, but the two years has been eaten up in school and it's got, I mean, 70 universities can produce a heck of a lot more for ready to go controllers than two training centers, one in Oklahoma City and one in Atlantic City. I mean, you just can't flow that many people through that small window and letting the colleges do it. And by the way, they have a curriculum they have to follow and it's just as rigid as the one the FAA has. So that's a point of optimism. I just thought I would throw out there, utilize what you can utilize and it helps you get to the goal line. Use it.

Bill Carey: And the FAA is also introducing a simulation capability for air traffic control at, I think those are based at towers, and that's supposed to expedite the on-the-job training period. It's supposed to streamline that by a year. I think that it's something 18 months to two years of on the job training at a facility to have a facility rating or a certification. The simulator is going to be able to expedite that by a year, is what I've heard.

Randy Babbitt: Well, at simulation, I mean there's an old adage for pilots. A good pilot's never a surprise pilot. Well, a good controller's never a surprise controller either. If you've seen it before, it's not a surprise. And simulation allows you to have scenarios that you would never, I mean, well, you would hope it wouldn't even happen, but they do. And if you've had a setup where somebody suddenly taxis out onto the runway in a scenario that's simulated, you'll know what to do. You will have seen it and you have a much better feel for the reaction required. And if you did it wrong, okay, fine, let's back up. Let's do it again. You did this, see what happened. That won't work. You got to do it this way. Fine. That's why we simulate things and I think simulators are incredibly valuable in flight training and they're equally valuable in controller training.

Christine Boynton: Sean, do you want to go in a little bit about what our readers are saying about the overall plan?

Sean Broderick: Most of the feedback really, but goes into this, you can change the infrastructure, but until you start changing the procedures, I mean, here's one that references another RTCA committee that was done that met and came into recommendations over 20 years ago, and they talked about the high altitude redesign program, which I remember writing some about, I dunno if Randy may remember that it was again, and they talk about how, look, we've done a lot of, we've deployed various new airspace capabilities including RNAV routes, navigation reference system, special use airspace mitigation and more flexibility. But without funding consistent funding and a plan, we fell short of some of the goals that were laid out in those in the RTCA report recommendations. I think it just comes back to fundamentally we're trying to improve a system that's still, it's not DC-3 era, but it's old and you can match the VORs to where bonfires were before there were beacons, and the beacons are where the bonfires are until you come up with a fundamental change in how we're going to approach this.

And we talked about this on the other podcast, you can only modernize so much if you're not, and there's no fleet equipment, nothing's changing on the fleet. So we're not adding any capabilities. So I mean, I failed to see, I mean, I go with so far as saying I failed to see how anything they're talking about doing in the new air traffic control plan, the brand new air traffic control plan would have changed anything that happened at DCA on that night in January that it wasn't a technology issue. It was a procedural issue, at least in my view. And the NTSB will focus on their probable cause will start with the acute mistakes that individuals may or may not have made. Maybe some controller communication error, maybe some error, the pilots in the crew in the Blackhawk, but fundamentally it was the procedures in place or the lack of procedures that allowed that scenario to happen. Nothing they're talking about changing the next three years is going to change that. They've already changed it by banning helicopter flying, which is great. However, they had done 40 years of that kind of flying without having this kind of accident. It doesn't mean it was safe, but it doesn't mean you can't do it either. So it's really about changing how things are done. That's how real change is made. And nothing that the administration is talking about is going to change any of that, and you can't change that in three years.

Randy Babbitt: Well, some of that, Sean, in all fairness, there was some common sense it was out the window. So we want to teach helicopters how to fly over a river at night. Did we have to do it at National Airport? One of the busiest airports in the country. We have gone up to Potomac about 30 miles and done the same training.

Sean Broderick: It's a whole different podcast. Randy Babbitt. That's a whole different podcast and it may be one that's worth having, but you're absolutely right. There were a lot of things. I mean, the first thing I looked at when I started reporting on this, I asked pilots to send me all the special stuff that they have to learn about helicopter flying into when they're flying into DCA. Send me everything that you're told about all the helicopter stuff. We're not told anything. I said, what

Randy Babbitt: I equated, one of my grandkids asked me, he said, was that necessary? I said, that would be like teaching kids how to, they're going into the first grade and we want to teach 'em to use the crosswalk. So we're going to go out on the I-95 and train. Come on.

Sean Broderick: Right. Well, and nothing again, they've addressed this, but with very acute things and the bigger turning on if the helicopter and had ADS-B on would've made a big difference because nothing in the CRJ would've picked up that ADS-B, nothing that they're required to have anyway. Could have had an iPad up there playing around with it, but that would not have been, wouldn't have sterile cockpit if you're playing around on your iPad to look at ADS-B. Right.

Randy Babbitt: It was one of those classics. Somebody, I love the expression when you talk about accidents that every now and then all the holes in the Swiss cheese line up. It doesn't happen very often, but when it does look out and that's what happens, it had a whole bunch of things. Any one of 'em removed from the equation, no accident.

Sean Broderick: Well, and to that point, and you hear a lot of references today to impending one of these times, we're going to have an accident. And that mid-air collision certainly was a stunner because a mid-air collision in this day and age involving an airliner, very surprising. And you knew at some point there was going to be another major accident, a major Part 121 passenger accident. As they say, the first's Colgan, even though there've been a couple of others in there, and some cargo ones too. The idea that the runway issues that we've been talking about or the ATC issues are going to lead to something is going to happen. You keep hearing people not necessarily in the trades, but outside saying they were saying the same things back in the editorials in the 1950s, and lo and behold, they were right. So far we haven't been right. And that speaks to how well we keep those Swiss cheese holes misaligned with everything that has gone sort of around or around the system to help make it safer.

Christine Boynton: I mean, one thing that I'd like to ask, because I know that we've all done a little bit of reading and brushing up on our history, right, in the weeks and months leading up to this podcast, but as you say, Sean, it feels a little bit in some ways, not always, but as kind of a, here we are again moment reading some of the things that were said in those editorials back then sound like things that we have been writing today or could be writing today. So I'm curious to kind of pick your brains, I mean, in your reading and in your brushing up on history, did anything pop out to you from that time period in the mid-fifties that we should be keeping in mind now that air traffic control is again, not keeping up with the demands of the system? Did anything come out to you as this is something that could be relevant again today?

Randy Babbitt: I mean, there's a couple of things that I'm aware of that don't help as we move forward. We came up with this grand idea that we would separate the air traffic organization from the FAA. I'm not on either side of the argument, but don't start down that path and get substantially into that path and then change your mind. And we've had too many times where we have a big heading change start on a plan and we do this, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is better. Let's cancel that and we're going to do this one. But we wind up with a lot of plans that are putting in the shredder and they're not. We need to have more certainty to the long range plans, and it needs to be capable of evolving. Have we discovered the latest stuff we're going to use? No. I mean, I guarantee you, a year from now we're going to find you'll just put this little button up on the radio and the airplane.

It'll know right where it is and tell everybody in town, I mean the stuff, it is just going to get better. And we need to design systems that are perfectly capable of accommodating and adapting to these changes as we come along. But we pour concrete and this is what we're going to do, and two years later we finish it up. Meanwhile is been two years of technological advances that would've really improved the system, but we poured concrete back here. So that would be my biggest suggestion is let's have a long-term plan, but have that plan be flexible enough to adapt to changes in technology as they're discovered and implemented.

Bill Carey: On my part, the ongoing theme I've seen throughout the decades is lack of funding stability of the FAA and I would place the blame squarely on the shoulders of Congress and the dysfunction of political parties that make up our Congress. I think they should just get out of the way that the FAA should not be subject to the annual appropriation cycle of Congress and kind of let the experts do what they may. And I believe some of the Airways Trust Fund that's kind of behind the funding of the FAA is also kind of peeled off for other projects as well. So the money that the users of the system pay that goes into the Airways Trust Fund, should be used directly back to fund the system and to maintain what the FAA is able to do.

Randy Babbitt: Well, you also have a minor issue in there that the DOT, the Department of Transportation and round numbers has somewhere between 65 and 70,000 people in the DOT. 50,000 of those are the FAA. And so you're one of the children with eight other departments. Everything's got to go through the Department of Transportation. If there was ever an argument for a standalone agency, it would be, why don't we just move that one over and everything would be flying rails, pipe, all that. Let's solve all. But this is a very large organization and to have to get approval for everything you do is probably slows the system down a little bit. I'm not advocating that maybe there may be ways to better handle it, but it just always seemed awkward to me that somebody that is three times bigger than everybody else in the DOT put together still is under the DOT, but that's just a personal comment.

Sean Broderick: Right now, and the DOT of course is cabinet level department. So they get their leader changed with every administration. They tried to ease the impact on that for the FAA by bringing in five-year fixed terms for the administrator. But it seems as though that the political influences around that administrator position makes it impossible or difficult, I would say to serve when you're appointed in one administration and then the parties change political challenges with being a holdover from a previous administration that caused both of the last two permanent administrators to say, you know what? This isn't as efficient area. I'm not getting it done the way I thought I could get it done. But similar in terms of the bigger picture, Christine, to answer your question, yeah, it's how, it's the lack of a firm plan. You've known for decades what needs to be done, and in most cases, even the technology has been there, but there hasn't been a handle on the how, whether it was funding or whether back in the fifties it was who was going to do it because there wasn't an agency to do it.

But it's amazing to me that you have all of the solutions. It's not like we need to invent a lot of new things to get this done. Some would argue we don't need to invent anything new to get this done. You just need to put some boxes on airplanes and train some people and get some systems deployed. Not easy, I mean not simple, and to Randy's point, you have to do it in a way where it maintains there's flexibility maintained, but just having been able to come with a how, and I applaud the Biden administration for their efforts to get something done, and hopefully they'll make it blackouts less frequent and things more reliable. But in terms of getting to a better how, I don't think we're any closer than we've been. I mean, we're going to have to leverage NextGen as much as we can, which we talked about that last podcast.

I think it shifted from a free flight to let's take advantage of everything that all the airplanes already have to the max and let's just do that, I think. Is that fair, Randy? Is that fair to say that sort of shifted along those lines around your time? Let's say you did it, but a lot of parallels to me. You're right. A lot of these words that we written, these editorials mean they could have been written, take out some of the death totals, and they could have been written yesterday. Joe Anselmo could have written them or capable current editor.

Christine Boynton: We're somehow at the end of our hour already. So I guess kind of as a final wrap up, Randy, drawing on your experience from both industry and Washington, are there any final thoughts kind of on the ideal path forward here, and maybe it's in the headlines and coverage and commentary around ATC this year? Is there something that you feel hasn't really been said or is critical to understand? Just kind of any final thoughts?

Randy Babbitt: I wish that as we move forward, obviously you have to approve these monies, and I know there's a huge concern about excess spend building and all of that stuff. But in the priorities of the world, we're moving at any given moment, there's 7,000 airplanes up there moving 2 million people a day. And in terms of safety, I mean it's unprecedented and we need to get past being political about these things and being practical about it and put in place what's best for the system, not what's best for the OMB or somebody else who's going to cost it out and say, well, that's just too expensive. It's never too expensive. If your child is one of those ones in the wreckage, it wasn't too expensive. So I think going forward, let's look at actually fixing the system and worry a little less about the politics. There's other places you can do that and go from there.

Christine Boynton: Thank you, Randy, and thanks for joining us today. That is a wrap for this episode of Check 6 Revisits. Special thanks to our producers, Jeremy Kariuki, Cory Hitt and podcast editor, Guy Ferneyhough and to Bill Carey and Sean Broderick for links to some of the things we referenced today, including our archive. Check the show notes on aviationweek.com, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. To delve into our archive for yourself Aviation Week subscribers can head to archive.aviationweek.com. If you enjoyed the episode and want to help support the work that we do, please head to Apple Podcasts and leave us a star rating or write a review. Thank you for listening and have a great week.