WASHINGTON — The scratchy and time-consuming radio transmissions that pilots use to communicate route changes before taking off from airports may soon be a thing of the past for some airlines.
The Federal Aviation Administration is giving the go-ahead for a new data and email system that allows tower controllers and airplanes sitting on the tarmac to relay requests and instructions for flight plans. It’s being touted as one of the most significant improvements to the U.S. air-traffic system, with promises of unclogging airports, saving airlines money and reducing emissions.
“This saves a tremendous amount of an air traffic controllers’ time,” Ray Adams, a controller at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, said as he demonstrated the system Thursday. “This is a huge leap forward.”
The system essentially brings the kind of automation now common to a smartphone into an airplane cockpit. In trials in Newark and Memphis, Tennessee, planes flown by United Continental Holdings, United Parcel Service and FedEx were able to cut to the front of departure queues and shave time off delays when bad weather descended.
The so-called datalink system is being rolled out in increments and will be at more than 50 U.S. airports by next year, the FAA said in a statement.
FAA Administrator Michael Huerta said the agency expects to spend $741 million to equip airport towers, and it would cost $800 million more to bring the system to the FAA’s regional centers overseeing high-altitude flights.
Huerta acknowledged recent concern about the potential for hacking into airline electronics, and said the agency had taken multiple steps to keep the new data and email system secure.
“There are many, many layers of protection that are built into the technology systems that are certified and are used on aircraft,” he said.
The FAA’s design criteria requires that electronics on planes and in air-traffic systems be resilient enough to withstand any single failure, including a hacking attack, he said. He didn’t discuss protections in the datalink system.
“It is something that we all take very seriously. It’s something that we’re continuing to focus on,” he said.
The program is particularly aimed at more quickly changing flight routes during stormy weather, the cause of most airline delays.
It’s up to the individual airlines to decide if they want to participate and foot the cost of installing new technology on each of their planes. Those that do will be able to leave quicker during bad weather, according to the FAA.
“Those minutes saved not only help the airplane get out sooner, but it saves gas and frees up taxiway space,” Gregg Kastman, an airline captain for UPS who has helped the freight carrier adopt the new technology.
Currently, if planes need to be routed around bad weather it requires a lengthy radio conversation with a tower controller to deliver the new track before they can even takeoff.
It’s not uncommon to have more than a dozen planes lined up at busy hubs like Newark or New York’s John F. Kennedy International and each one must take several minutes to receive its new clearance, Kastman said. More time is needed to manually program the route into the plane’s navigation equipment and to check with airline dispatchers to ensure there is enough fuel on board, he said.
Using datalink, a pilot can receive that same new route in seconds. The route is also automatically loaded into the plane’s navigation computer and sent simultaneously to the airline’s dispatchers, also saving valuable time, Kastman said.
In a demonstration at the Newark airport tower, Adams, who worked with the FAA on the system on behalf of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association union, sent a new route to a plane on the tarmac in less than 15 seconds.
Having a text message with the route also reduces the chances that pilots or controllers will misunderstand, thereby improving safety, Kastman said.
An example of the system’s benefits occurred in July when storms hit Newark and departures were being delayed, said United’s chief technical pilot for communications, Chuck Stewart.
A United flight preparing to leave got its revised route via the FAA’s new data system and was able to depart on time, Stewart said at the briefing. Meanwhile, a flight on another carrier that was in line ahead of the United plane had to manually update its route. By the time that second plane was getting ready to takeoff 15 minutes later, departures at the airport were halted as the weather moved in, he said.
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