FAA sitting on their hands

[labbats]

Today we were talking in the cockpit and we got on the topic of the FAA. Namely why they haven't moved to allow airlines struggling with fuel costs to go GPS direct, or made any move to change our duty regs.

16 hours on duty is far from safe. 12 hours seems reasonable. Seems to me people move up and hold a line and forget all about us on reserve pushing 14-16 hours when thunderstorms hit O'hare.

I'm not familiar with all airlines, but I know that all our FMSs have dual GPS backups, we mainly fly with that and use Navaids as backup, rather than vice-versa. We could go direct anywhere. I imagine most everyone is the same.


(edited to answer questions by inconceivable)

 

[Inconceivable]

How many air carriers have "GPS" installed? Not many.

Who is approved for Class II navigation in their Ops Specs?

Who is going to manage them in flight with current controller staffing on 1970's equipment? There are only four arrivals to a hub--they've got to get in line somewhere.

What duty regs would they change?

And, assuming that the FAA wanted to change anything, who would pay for it?

 

[Lrjtcaptain]

Hey Labbats....the reason you don't get direct is due to the fact that we need some order to the NAS. If we had airlines flying anywhere and everywhere is to hard for us to see how they may be a factor. The FAA however has invented a new route structure. Dont remember what it is called but every Lat Long degree has a number and letters associated with it. With FMS and /G, you can pretty much get a much better direct routhing yet we keep some order to the chaos that already exists. We have a video on it at work, i can look up what the system is called but im sure someone on here not only knows it but uses it as well..

You just miss flying direct with me man, those were the days, now we have real jobs and they suck!!! Except our incident from Great falls montana to missoula...."STAY ON THE AIRWAY or you will get shot down!!!"

 

[Vector4fun]

Labbats,

Let me try to answer your question with a question:

Can you describe for me your "trajectory" or route and altitudes, between PHX and DFW tomorrow, missing all the active SUA airspace, all the significant weather, and adjusting for the most favorable winds, in terms that I can plug into a NAS computer, with accuracy of say, +/- 2nm; and then have distributed via the NAS to all the sectors along your route of flight?

Understand, that an ABQ or FTW Center controller needs to be able to look at a strip or computer screen and in a few seconds deduce that you, Labbats, are going to be crossing the western boundry of his sector at XX:YY Zulu, at Coordinates such and such, and will be exiting his sector at Coordinates this and that so he can anticipate any conflicts, point-outs and/or handoffs as required.

This little exercise has the added benefit of partially explaining why there are so many delays when weather affects an area, All those controllers you're talking to are typing madly away unseen, trying to do exactly that, (with much less accuracy). We start seeing strips with revision #6, 7, 8, etc. on them. Not to mention all the verbal coordination being attempted that normally wouldn't occurr. We might have three things to do for every transmission we make at times. A revision here, point-out there, manual hand-off everywhere because the NAS data is lagging 5-10 minutes behind "real-time". Correcting the corrections. Verbally communicating the requested headings and speed restrictions to the next guy It's just a zoo.

My guess is we're gonna have to see two generations of data-link and about two more overhauls of the NAS before "free-flight" or something like it is realistic. I'm figuring 20 more years minimum. But then a dozen things could happen to change everything.

Most everybody gets direct between Midnight and 5:00 am though, except around MEM and SDF perhaps...


[edited for grammar, and still not quite right...]

 

[FlyJordan]

Good ole SDF, if it wasnt for UPS I don't think we would have Louisville Approach. I like it though, UPS gives me something to listen to when I am coming in in the middle of the night.

 

[EagleRJ]

I don't think the FAA will change the 16-hour duty day. The reason is that the negative effect it has on safety can't be quantified sufficiently to warrant modifying it. There have been accidents that the NTSB determined fatigue played a primary role in, but it isn't given credit for the supporting role it plays in nearly every incident and operational error. Most accidents occur after a series of errors and factors come together- the "accident chain". Fatigue is one link of the chain that can always be expected to show up.
There's no pressure from the public to change the 16-hour duty day, either. As far as the layman is concerned, "being awake" for 16 hours while only actually working eight sounds like it's in line with what they do, and they don't see a problem with it.

As for going direct more, "Free Flight" as it's called has been a pipe dream for years now. The problem isn't individual aircraft being equipped with FMS/GPS, it's ATC's ability to detect conflicts and maintain seperation. Imagine 100 people circling a basketball court and rolling 1000 golf balls across the court in random directions to each other. That's the kind of picture a controller would have to deal with in a Free Flight environment. It would take massive computer power to detect conflicts and issue corrective altitudes/headings/speeds to an aircraft, and to do it without creating additional conflicts.
Clearing an aircraft direct today already involves checking every airway the route crosses, and as far as I know, it's done manually by each sector's controller. The controllers on here should be able to give a better description of what demands Free Flight would create, but I'm sure computers would need to play a greater role.

 

[DoinTime]

As for going direct more, "Free Flight" as it's called has been a pipe dream for years now. The problem isn't individual aircraft being equipped with FMS/GPS, it's ATC's ability to detect conflicts and maintain seperation. Imagine 100 people circling a basketball court and rolling 1000 golf balls across the court in random directions to each other. That's the kind of picture a controller would have to deal with in a Free Flight environment. It would take massive computer power to detect conflicts and issue corrective altitudes/headings/speeds to an aircraft, and to do it without creating additional conflicts.

I thought "free flight" would virtually eliminate the enroute control sectors, hence the term "FREE flight." The way I understood it each individual aircraft provided their own separation through what it essentially a refined TCAS (I believe it was called ADS-B) thru a satellite link. I'm sure this is way oversimplified but the point of free flight was to reduce the dependancy on the NAS (read: eliminate controller jobs) and provide for more efficient profiles and flight paths for aircraft operators.

 

[XTW]

Namely why they haven't moved to allow airlines struggling with fuel costs to go GPS direct,

It isn't ATC's job to help airlines cope with fuel costs. Fuel costs have to be taken care from managements position, namely, charge more for the tickets than it costs to fly the airplane. This fact seems to be lost in the business plan of the money losing airlines.

ATC's job is safety related, to help keep us from running into each other "up there".

X

 

[atrdriver]

Not to mention that if the FAA both approved direct routings AND reduced duty time limits (which I am all for), the lower duty time limits would negate the savings from the direct routings through larger crew requirements.

 

[Vector4fun]

I thought "free flight" would virtually eliminate the enroute control sectors, hence the term "FREE flight." The way I understood it each individual aircraft provided their own separation through what it essentially a refined TCAS (I believe it was called ADS-B) thru a satellite link. I'm sure this is way oversimplified but the point of free flight was to reduce the dependancy on the NAS (read: eliminate controller jobs) and provide for more efficient profiles and flight paths for aircraft operators.

That's one description of "Free Flight" that's been posed. Others have proposed systems where computers on the ground detect and fix conflicts by relaying course adjustments to your FMS via data-link. Controllers become system "monitors".

(yeah, right. After 30 min boredom sets in. After 3 hours, Spurs-Pistons debate sets in, after 3 days, relative merits of investment funds, and then after three weeks, computer freaks, and said controller is supposed to fix 6 conflicts in 30 seconds...)

Now, put yourself 50 miles out of DFW, there's 60 airplanes within 50 miles landing DFW, DAL, AFW, ADS, RBD, DTO, TKI, FTW, etc. There's another 60 departing all those same airports heading in different directions.

Even if you can see every target with ADS-B, how can you make any kind of judgement about who to avoid or follow unless you know yourself what each of those other aircraft is intending to do in the next 5 minutes? What altitude is each aircraft intending to climb or descend to? What speed are they making? What type are they? Who sets the sequence to rwy 18R? For that matter, how do you determine who is going to which runway at DFW?

ADS-B works fine when you're talking about 10 total airplanes within 50 miles and one runway, like Alaska. But then, so does Unicom if everybody's listening and talking.

 

[EagleRJ]

I thought "free flight" would virtually eliminate the enroute control sectors, hence the term "FREE flight." The way I understood it each individual aircraft provided their own separation through what it essentially a refined TCAS (I believe it was called ADS-B) thru a satellite link. I'm sure this is way oversimplified but the point of free flight was to reduce the dependancy on the NAS (read: eliminate controller jobs) and provide for more efficient profiles and flight paths for aircraft operators.

TCAS was never intended to be a primary seperation tool. It's a last-ditch Aluminum Shower Prevention Tool (ASPT) that is supposed to prevent a tragedy even if all the other levels in the system fail. If it comes down to that, even TCAS has its failings (reference the enroute collision between a B-757 and a Tu-154 over Germany in 2002). Any future FF system will need to have at least two redundant levels of seperation before TCAS, probably both computer and human.

I think ADS-B is intended to be used in areas of little or no radar coverage, both to provide seperation and for search/rescue use. It's used in Alaska so the bush pilots can tell where eachother are, since in a lot of areas, the terrain prevents radar use. Co-operative collision avoidance functionality is already provided in radar-controlled airspace by Mode-S TCAS-II.

 

[jobear]

Who cares if you still get paid block or better. How about I hold until fuel gets to the point where either I need to land or I want to land so I can have a smoke? Almost every sectors airspace is filled to capacity in the Eastern/Central sectors they give you direct when they can if not you fly the normal routing. I have no problem with that, as long as stated earlier Block or Better is in use. I just want to make above garauntee every month.

Then again I am probably of course with this post...help me Vector troll


Jobear

 

[ISaidRightTurns]

In my experience, it all depends on where you are going. If you fly thru my sector going to somewhere in Florida, or one of the big airports, You need to be on a route of some kind. But if I'm here in ATL and you are going direct BFI, I don't care. Someone out west might, but I don't.

 

[Vector4fun]

If it helps to explain things further, let me try to describe how things work when the weather is fine and everything runs smoothly:


Understand that the National Airspace System, hereafter referred to as the NAS, was programmed and structured to cope with VORs and airways. Over the years, the Center's Host system was "taught" to understand Lat/Long coordinates, but Terminal Systems still don't. Then came SIDs and STARs, and our computers "understand" those. In other words, when you've been issued the CWK2.TNV for example, the NAS is programmed to understand exactly where and what altitudes you'll fly, so it knows exactly which sectors need the flight data, and what sectors will work the flight. The NAS knows whether to send the data to a Low, Intermediate, High, or Terminal sector based on published altitudes. The computers can initiate an automated HandOff to the correct sector without any action on the controller's part. All those SIDs (now DPS) and STARs are also codified in our LOAs with adjacent sectors, as are preferrential routings.

What all the above means, in simple terms, is that when everyone's flying published, preferrential routings, or even standard airways, or even direct to/from VORs, all the NAS computers "understand" exactly what the aircraft is doing, and works almost without a hitch distributing data from sector to sector. Controllers also aren't having to waste time with manual HOs and Point Outs, or other verbal coordination on landlines. Our LOAs cover 80-90% of typical IFR operations, right down to altitudes and speeds. I'm not guessing what fix the next arrival is comming from, or what altitude, I know. Likewise, the next sector doesn't have to worry about where my departures are going to cross his boundry. He knows exactly where as soon as he get's a strip. I may work a whole hour and not speak to the guy working the next sector.

When we start approving directs outside the LOAs, and outside the NAS's ability to understand, we have to go back to manually coordinating all this stuff. Something we don't mind when it's slow actually, but we can't keep up with when it's busy. The computers are forwarding data to the wrong sectors, which means the receiving controller not only doesn't have a strip, he may not even have a radar tag. You're just a [ * ] on his or my scope untill we manually force the data to the correct sector. We're constantly coordinating altitudes/headings to prevent conflicts at the sector boundries. Conflicts that don't occur when we're following SOP.

The more we controllers step outside the bounds of SOP, the more we have to do manually, and the less helpful the automation becomes. If that sounds trivial, imagine your FMS craps out and you're left with a Piper Altimatic and a KX-170. It's the same sort of situation.

 

[Reebo]

16 hours on duty is far from safe. 12 hours seems reasonable. Seems to me people move up and hold a line and forget all about us on reserve pushing 14-16 hours when thunderstorms hit O'hare.

I agree, but when you have airlines like Jet Blue trying to increase daily flight time limits, it only hurts the cause.

 

[ISaidRightTurns]

Alot

Isn't that what I said?