tv Key Capitol Hill Hearings CSPAN October 14, 2014 7:00pm-8:01pm EDT
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recessions in our nation's economic history. and there have been a few things like hurricanes and oil spills and other challenges that have been out there. throughout that entire 15-year period, funding for the faa has been flat or gone up every year. the general fund contribution has been robust. so as we look at alternatives, we want to make sure it's a clear evaluation. we understand where we're all trying to go. and we understand how we can get there together. but i think sometimes it's easy to look and say, junk what we have, let's do something big, let's do something bold, let's do something radical. that may be the appropriate response, but there may be a better alternative. and we want to have that conversation, to make sure that when we have meetings without the five years from now and ten years from now, we're always able to begin by saying, today
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the united states has the best air transportation system in the world. >> it's kind of interesting, one thing that you emphasized, in all the work we do, and we all sit on a mutual advisory boards and technical committees and working groups and everything else, i think especially when you look at a board like -- i think folks kind of come in from a much more kind of performance based and outcome based objective as opposed to a lot of other groups where it's something that is -- something that prompts them to kind of stake a position and kind of draw a little bit of a line in the sand. but i think that the one thing we can all agree on is that we have to do something, regardless if we just refine the system that we have or take a much more transformative approach. with that in mind, mel is right in the epicenter of where all this change is happening. he's actually one of the agents
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of change management, and also the fellow that makes sure that the car still stays on the road, doesn't back up and doesn't stop while they're changing the tire. >> thanks, sean. it's a blessing to be the representative of those 20,000 union members to make sure the car doesn't stop. i've been doing less of watching the car, individual cars, and watching more proverbially the freeway, and the highway of the system. with that said, just to reflect, i appreciate the title of the presentation and the opportunity to represent nacta. we want to talk about the trajectory of modernization. some of the potholes that we see now, and that we believe we'll experience along the way. and then the promise. so never having been one to shy away from tough problems, let's just laser on the potholes for starters and i'll talk about the
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beginning and end of the panel. for the pothole side, it doesn't take long for members of the aviation community to distill down in short order that there's two basic perspectives. almost the tale of two stories of modernization. as soon as you start to look at it in-depth at all, you see that the scenario that plays out perfect timing with last week, the eaa, in oshkosh, where you had this incredible robust desire, general aviation community that participated in the air space. and then this week where we have this group of union airline pilots that operate the aviation transportation hub. those are really the two ends of that story to say, how do we modernize the system that has that much diversity. that clearly represents a very significant pothole. how do you even define you'll modernize a system that sees both ends of the spectrum. another way to look at it is if
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you change your perspective a little bit, say we've got this core legacy infrastructure that exists, and has existed. like sean said, for many, many years. it's very resilient, very robust. actually very efficient. if you look at the cost to operate the current system compared to our peers around the world, we're very proud of the fact that it's an efficient, both from a cost perspective and capacity perspective system. so that's one aspect of modernization is how do we maintain or sustain those core components that are necessary to be there far into the future. or you look at the leveraging the satellite capabilities. we can't have all of one or all of the other. we need to somehow find a way to meld the capabilities of both pieces of -- or both components of the system. again, a tale of two stories, two very large potholes, depending on what perspective that you use to view them from.
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let's back up and talk a little bit about the trajectory of air space modernization, or next gen as it's currently branded. there's been significant efforts over the years to do that, where there was free flight, or air 2100 or 2000 or depending on the branding. i would say one thing that's critical to me to communication to my membership on the ground base side of the microphone, and i'm sure it's critical to communicate to kmt hooks on the airline side, what is the role of the human, the human element in the far term of mass modernization. i think one of the great places to look to answer that question is, what are the air framers doing from a human factor perspective. what is it that they're going to ask the pilot of the future to do. and what are they investing in the human factor research today. and significantly, boeing
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announced, again, significant to this argument, it didn't get a lot of air time, was that they had essentially zeroed out the line item for human factors funding for airborne self-separation. what they're saying as air framers, the major air framers say this initial concept of far term next gen is there will be super high levels of automation, and controllers sitting back and watching and controlling by exception, becoming more air traffic managers, and pilots being more system managers. there is a deep recognition that there's a human -- a strong human role in even the far term of whatever this modernization effort is called now, or will be called in the future. you can see that across the different modernization plans of the worldwide nasps, the service provides around the world. they all adhere to an essential
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block upgrade system that accepts the fact that there's going to be a large amount of human interaction for many years to come. so it's kind of the trajectory of modernization. so i would say considering the potholes, it's a good trajectory. and it's realistic, and there's a lot of promise that's built in. so it goes to the last part of the title, which is what are the promises. one of the things that captain moak had been very vocal about is, let's take those things that we know that we can do, and do them now. let's fast forward those benefits. let's prove that we've transitioned from research and development to implementation, and then now buy us some time, or buy us some bandwidth to do the more aggressive things down the road. i would say that the initial net that was cast across air space modernization was everything from low end ga, to very high
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end commercial high density operations. and the research and development put on the table for the implementers, significant benefits in each of those areas. so what we've done is recategorization where we see significant through-puts on laying in a new runway, called a through-put increase similar to a virtual runway. taking that and doing it everywhere where it's relevant. that's what captain moak is talking about. those types of deployments or implementations. so we've talked a little bit about the potholes. talked a little bit about the trajectory. talked a little bit about the promise. what we recognize is that we have a foot in each one of those worlds depending on regardless of the perspective. we see a very robust aviation system in the u.s. that we participate in, at three of the four levels. the fourth level being the
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uncontrolled airports. the low, low density ga airports. but other than that, whatever we decide to do as a country as we move forward is to ensure that all three or four of those levels are protected and maintained. so stable funding, when it comes to modernization, critical. absolutely critical. especially when you start to talk about the more complex programs. they'll take five or six years to deploy. we have to stabilize the funding. but of primary concern for us and our membership, and the members here in the room operating on the flight deck and those wonderful, wonderful people up at eaa last week is that we've got to recognize that this is a very diverse system that does not exist anywhere else in the world. so we have to do it very methodically. so, again, i look forward to the conversation end, and absolutely to your questions. >> let's jump right in. go ahead, bob. >> i'd like to challenge a little bit something ed said. about stable funding.
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if you look five years ago at the faa's official projection for what the facilities and equipment budget, the capital budget for modernization would be by this year, by 2014, it was $1 billion more than the actual amount that they have to work with today. because of the overall federal budget pressures. so, well, it may be stable in terms of constant levels, but it's not at the level that was planned for serious investment in modernization. and that is why the nac is having to do triage. we wanted to do this, and this, and this, but now we have to focus only on the things we can do near term that have short-term benefits because we don't know, we, the faa, don't know what our funding is going to be next year, let alone three years from now or five years from now. and the difference between that and the self-funded corporate model, however it's organized,
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is that if the money is depoliticized, and a bondable revenue stream, then air traffic corporations like air canada, air services can issue revenue bonds, just as electric utilities do, just as railroads do, just as airports do. and fund -- finance the big capital programs. get the money in place where it's needed now, and then pay for it out of the ongoing revenues, as users experience the benefits. and that is a model that -- that's how airports do their capital programs. that's how almost all of the other navigational services these days worldwide in developed countries do it. we're the only country trying to operate out of basically cash flow, that is not determinable in advance. it's only determine able by each year's appropriations process that is con strabd strained by
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the national budget. you have to look forward 15 years and say what is the position of the federal government? what kind of across the board budget curtailments are there going to be? it's a ten-year program, we got a two-year reprieve so the cuts were not in effect last year and this year. but after -- there's eight years still to come of sequester. unless congress can come up with a new overall budget fix. we have a very serious funding environment in which we're trying to modernize and get the benefits to keep our system the best in the world. and in some of these technology areas, we actually are falling behind. canada has nationwide controller pilot data link. it will be a decade, fingers crossed, before we have that here. there are satellite based oceanic atsb. faa was invited to be a lead investor and get that off the
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ground. and there's no way they could make a decision, because they would have to have appropriated funding that comes into play several years from now. there's no way an organization on the federal budget can do that. there's things like that that i think we really need to take into account. that's what's driving a lot of the effort for looking at a big change, a big funding and organizational change as opposed to just minor reforms. >> i think there are several different ways to look at the funding issue. and certainly the faa's internal projections of how much money they would have right now is a fair way to do it. what i did is simply went back 15 years, and i could have gone back longer, because i recall as far back as the 1997 reauthorization debate. there was a lot of conversation about the funding system being broken. the general fund going away.
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>> right. >> but if you look at that, each and every year, if you had said, i bet the faa's budget will be, at least what it was the year before, and potentially go up a percent or two, you would have been entirely accurate for 15 years. despite an incredibly uncertain environment out there, which as i said before, involves wars and attacks and recessions and so forth. and that's not to suggest that what we have is perfect. but a lot of times people make it sound as if it simply can't function. it's functioning. >> i completely agree that it is functioning. but i think it could do a lot better, though, seeing on what other countries are able to do. admittedly they're smaller. admittedly they haven't had the same kind of history of -- we have been historically a technology leader. i think that's questionable
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today. it's certainly questionable looking forward over the next decade. not that we aren't inventing new things. but being able to implement them and get the benefits from them, i think is very much open to question. >> i think there is a challenge. certainly we see products get manufactured. they need to be certified. and we've had some challenges at the faa, working through the certification, working through the approvals. but a lot of what we're talking about when we talk about air traffic control reform is we're talking about the air traffic system. >> no, sure. >> one of the things we've seen in the business aviation community, particularly as we've become more international in nature, and that's certainly true over the last 10, 15, 20 years, what i am consistently hearing from operators is, when we fly around the world, we come back and conclude that from the point the wheels leave the pavement to the point the wheels touch back down, the united
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states is the system where we think is best operated. i want to be clear. where we are today doesn't mean that's where we'll always be. it doesn't mean we shouldn't change and evolve. in fact, we've been at the forefront of articulating the need to evolve. >> yeah. >> i just want to be a little bit cautious with the all is broken. sometimes it seems to me that maybe with regard to funding, it may have worked better in practice than one would have expected in theory. it has been pretty stable for the last 15 years. and that doesn't mean the question doesn't change that. but it also doesn't mean we can take it for granted that funding won't be there. >> right. >> there's an interesting -- maybe an anecdote that would maybe help inform both sides of the debate, assuming that's a
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debate format. >> this is a moderating panel. the best one for me. >> perfect. if you look at -- i alluded to what the other entities are doing worldwide, and what boeing is doing from a factory perspective, let's look at what's really happening. if you take a look at -- most people would characterize the most advanced pbn, performance based navigation, based system, and most people would point to australia. and they've done a great job at deploying significant levels of pbn. and they are reformed. i'm not exactly sure which model. >> government corporation. >> thank you, government corporation. that tension between the regulator and the operator, their version of the ato, there's intense tension there now, to the point there's,
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depending who you talk to, they're ready to revoke the certificate. from a modernization perspective, if the funding is stable, are we deploying the technology on a systemwide basis at the right pace. and so what i'll tell you is if you look at their highest density hub sydney, my understanding is they're not as aggressive there as they are at the spokes. there are certainly things we could do better, faster, better and faster. but we have to be careful not to rush too far forward. so my point there is that both stable funding and a reformed relationship between the nsb and regulator, doesn't guarantee success when you transition to high technology. >> i want to follow up a little bit, too. if it's okay, sean. >> go ahead. and then i have a question for marla right after that. >> sometimes it's easy to blame congress on funding issues.
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but i also think, you know, when we started the process of next gen, there was a lot we didn't know. and there's always been a sense, well, we're ready to do next gen now, it's just a matter of funding. i think as we've gone through some of the panels at an industry level, we recognize, boy, we need to really be careful here. we don't necessarily know. and so in some cases, i think what i've heard from congress is, we'd like next gen. we want to be supportive of next gen. what do you need to make next gen a reality? i'm not sure the faa, or even the faa and industry together have always consistently articulated that. we haven't always said, if you give us an extra billion dollars, here's what we'd buy, here's when we would deploy it and these are the benefits we'd receive. that was acute to me when
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following the great recession, there was a stimulus package. and while we were able to put some things forward, i don't think anyone in industry felt we were as crisp as we would have liked to be about saying, we want to do this, at this price, look for it to be certified, implemented and paying these benefits on these dates certain. and so i think while there's a lot of frustration with our evolution to next gen, there's also a lot of learning that's been going on. >> i agree. one of the things we're doing, and this is well traveled ground for us and probably a lot of folks out there, when we look at these potential models from moving next gen forward, we say leave the faa as is, business as usual, or a variance of that where we say, take the faa function, and have it still live under d.o.t. that's basically the first option. the second option is what marla
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hinted on, the government corporation, something tantamount to amtrak. as soon as you say the word amtrak, people just -- >> pba. >> okay, pba. interest bonds. so it changes some of the architecture of the governance and decision-making process. but it still doesn't really resolve the funding issue, because it's still buried in the appropriations, federal authorizations and everything else. >> to an extent. >> to an extent. that tends to drive us toward the third model, which is the ansb, the fully privatized model because of the way you can go out and seek capital elsewhere rather than having to go through uncle sam to do that. but the question i have, and i'm going to start with marla is, is there another option that's kind of a hybrid where we can have the architecture, we can have the decision-making and still create a line of funding that is not subject to as much handling on the part of the government? >> i don't think any funding
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model like that has ever been demonstrated to work in this country thus far. i mean, we've had a number of trust funds. we have an airport trust fund that was not actually created to pay for the entire system. so it is working as it should, partially general fund. but looking at every other trust fund within our country, they don't work -- they haven't been sustainable. and so sitting up here, listening to this, i've been thinking, is there another way to fund this within the federal government. and one option potentially could be, there is a president for having appropriations a couple years in advance. i believe it's the national public broadcasting company. they have appropriations two years in advance. but that might not solve the problems either. you know, we could appropriate money two, three, five years in advance, but are we going to have enough funding to be able to modernize our system? and we still wouldn't have bonding capabilities at that point either.
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>> i think a key thing is having a revenue stream that permits and facilitates bonding for large-scale capital programs. what every large airport in the country, certainly the airports you fly to, have as a matter of routine, and so does every other utility, including pba, that is a fundable thing. doing large-scale capital programs, especially when the cash flow has to come from appropriations in a very uncertain going forward budget climate, it's a recipe for problems. whereas, a bondable revenue stream -- and these are investment grade bonds. air traffic control is a monopoly. there are not competitors there. so the investment community says, where do we sign? they will love to fund it. and give you the money and have a reasonable assurance of annual debt service payments.
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why not take advantage of the structure like that when it's readily available, and works in other countries, works in other industries in the united states, that are also vital essential infrastructure. including the airports. there's an awful lot of precedence there. it's not like stepping off the cliff into the unknown. we know this kind of model works for toll roads, too. which i do a lot of work on. so i think that's a key part of the reform conversation that's really going on, is to learn from that kind of an example. here's one other part of this, though. when john cryton from canada addressed the may meeting of the eno project, one of the things he pointed out to us is the question of access, remote airports and so forth, that canada has also. and there are two ways to go on that. one would be to ask the government for an explicit subsidy. because those things don't pay for themselves.
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the other would be to do it -- to cross-subsidize it internally. charge enough to the customers that can afford it to cover the cost of the things that don't pay for themselves. they decided on the latter, very deliberately and very specifically because if they asked the government for partial funding, then all the controls that we're talking about that are a problem for faa, of reporting to at least six congressional committees, having the budget that has to be approved by omb, and you can only ask for what omb will approve, having the gao looking over your shoulder, having the inspector general, as opposed to a governing body of the customers, the stakeholders saying, yes and no about the policies. as soon as you have taxpayer money, you have all the oversight things. when i talked to senior faa officials and retired ones that can speak more freely, they say again and again how top management time is taken up by
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responding to all these overseers, and they're required to -- not only to testify occasionally, but every time the inspector general gets a report, they must by law respond to all the recommendations and so forth. that takes a lot of time. and we talked to them candid lid off the record, and they'll tell you that. that's not how you should be running a business. >> i'm sure a lot of people are going to grant david grisel here after those comments. just a reminder, we have about a half an hour left here for the panel. you have the opportunity if you have a question that you'd like to bring up, but i'll keep the conversation going, as i'm sure ed has something to say. >> i think it's probably clear to everyone, but i want to make sure it doesn't get lost. when we talk about bonding authority, we're talking about borrowing. >> right. >> we're talking about borrowing a sum of money today, and paying it back over a period of years. and usually when you go to
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borrow money, you want to have a very specific idea what it is you're buying. >> absolutely. >> that's why i think it's important as we talk about next gen that we understand, where is it, and what exactly do we want to do. if we're going to go borrow $1 billion, or $10 billion, what are we going to buy, what's it going to give us, on what date certain. because the users are being asked to pay for it. if you look at what we have today, let's say the faa has roughly $16 billion, $13 billion of it comes through the user taxes, about $3 billion of it comes through general fund appropriations. assuming that the system is $16 billion going forward, next year, that means if we privatize the system, then the $3 billion goes away, and we've got to find a way collectively to pay for that $3 billion that used to be
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the government, and then we've got to look for the additional money. we need to be pretty sure, i think, before we as an industry take on $3 billion to break even, and additional money to move forward. we understand what is it we're trying to buy, when are we going to have the benefits, what are the other costs associated with it. it doesn't mean it's the wrong way to do it. but again, the idea that we'll just borrow our way out of it and pay for it later is something we need to be a little cautious about. >> but there's two things that i feel i need to say. and we can talk about the deeper nuances on the borrowing and buying piece. maybe we can get back to that. let's say the -- the simple answer to your question is, there has to be another model. i believe that firmly that there has to be another option to at least discuss. there's two words i like, that convince me. and one is liability.
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and the other is responsibility. from the liability side, you look at the mitigation, the cost to mitigate a lot of the legacy infrastructure that's out there, the d.o.r.s and whatnot. you probably pretty rapidly approach a funding liability to mitigate the legacy components that could equal a superfund site. there's a reason we had a superfund to do a cleanup site. that's a liability. there's insurance liability. to look at the cost to insure the operations, there's not any one insurer in the world and maybe not even a conglomerate of all the insurers of the world that will take on the risk of insuring our operation. the third would be pension liability. pension liability is no stranger to anybody in this room. if you look at the pension liability for air traffic controllers, it's fairly significant. there's the three of them.
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responsibility. going back to the g.a. side. one of my alma mater's dirt strip down in southern california called chino airport in the middle of a cow field, there's learning going on there. and the responsibility, the relationship between air traffic controllers and student pilots is the -- we covet that relationship and responsibility that's inherent on both sides. look at the stuff that happens as a result of the canada model where there's a co-located airstrip with a lake. it doesn't cost anything to land in the lake. more often than not they're choosing to land on the lake to save the user's fees. or there's weather in part of the u.s. and canada says, can we divert some flights. what will it cost? and they decide not to divert. there are negative pressures on that responsibility side of an air traffic system and pilots working together to operate as safe as possible. sean, i'll turn back to you and
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say, i think we really have to think deeply about all of those nuances. >> i have three more questions that just came up from that discussion. we could do this panel for several hours. >> thank you. we covered satellite navigation, which, of course, is absolutely essential to next gen. one element is the civil funding for faa for gps monitoring has been cut repeatedly. this session, though we haven't gotten to the conference committees, they cut it by more than a third. it's going to delay monitoring, as i understand it, from what i've been told. my question to you is two-fold. one, what have your organizations done, if anything, to follow up, or monitor this, because without the monitoring, you don't have the signals in the long run after gps
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modernization. for the current structure, are your organizations looking at this issue? have you weighed in on this issue? and for the future structures that you're talking about, how would this kind of funding be integrated into what you're talking about? currently it's coming through faa. but it's not happening from congress. and in some cases it's been actually delayed by faa itself. because they've got a lot of pressures. >> i have a tidbit that would be characterized by not much more than that. i would certainly pitch it back to the panel. what i would like to say essentially, what i hear you talking about, is alternative position of navigation and timing. if we say we're going solely gps based system, you have significant liabilities that are associated with that when we start to look at the fragility of the satellite system, whether it's from the solar flares, or missile attacks or denied
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environments, those types of things. so there's some puts and takes occurring within the legacy infrastructure versus satellite based infrastructure that's assessing that, because we still have a robust legacy ground based infrastructure, the timing piece, or reliance on the position navigation timing, that dependence, if you will, on the satellite system isn't as significant as it would be if we've already shut down 90% of the ground based stuff. so my guess is that those funding decisions that balance this that say, okay, we need to fund that, we need to be sure we get what we need out of the satellite based system, those types of things are more easily delayed. more difficult decisions because we still have this legacy of an infrastructure to fall back to. again, it's a tidbit. it may not get right at the heart of what you're asking, but i believe at least partially why you would see delayed or
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deferred funding. >> let me give a little bit different perspective on it. i think one of the things that really puts us in the focus is rpas. there's a congressional mandate for rpa, at least integration standard by the faa by september of 2015. and when you think about it, the only way we're going to have integration, especially more broadly up with the nas, is that if we have very stable signals, very stable satellite signals, communication signals, command and control signals, and the only way that's going to advance is if we make sure that we protect those signals, and that they're robust. after all, rpas have wireless pilots. there's nobody inside that aircraft to do something if there's some kind of a system failure. looking at it more systemically, to tag on to what mel just said, one of the things that we've also been participating in, is
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making sure that as we go to a more space based system away from a ground based system, we have the legacy hardware in service, for when we have the solar flare activity, for something that disrupts the signals or takes it down. we'll never be fully only space based next gen, we're just looking to strike the right balance. and as far as funding, we're always playing a game of triage, trying to, you know, push priorities forward and advocate for the things that we think are nearest and dearest at this point in time. otherwise, if we keep saying we need money here, and here and here, we're just borrowing the ocean and we'll lose our effectiveness. one of the questions i have -- was there a follow-up question? >> the monitoring is part of the new ground system. the ground system is essential to the new gps satellite. got to have it.
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and you can have a ground system without the monitoring, but the monitoring is essential for the aviation component for next gen. and it's going to be happening over a period of time. it's not like it's tomorrow. if you change the structure as you're discussing, the financing structure, are you going to incorporate this kind of funding for this? because it is essential to make next gen work. >> certainly. >> you look at the investment priorities of the reform worldwide. they're generally -- the pacing items are what's the legacy infrastructure, and what's the deployment strategy. i think a logical answer would be that, yes, they would reconcile that. maybe more rapidly than the federal government would, because of the other liabilities that they talked about. but they would reconcile that. >> thank you. >> thanks. one of the questions i have, and we've been talking a lot about money, right? but one of the questions i have and i'll throw it to the panel
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here, is when we had the sequestration hit, and basically when you had the 5% cut that basically got, you know, put over a smaller chunk of time which turned to a 10% cut, right? >> right. >> in the faa, research and development, that the problem became is that you had a consistent 10% uniform cut straight across the different lines of business. and anybody who has had experience managing any kind of business, or their own household budget, if you said, hey, you've got to cut 10% out of your finances, you wouldn't take 10% out of the mortgage, 10% of your car payment, you might skip landscaping or something like that, right? so in one respect, we talk about the overall amount of money. but in the second one we talk about the use of the money and the management of the money. can you comment a little bit about the lessons learned from that experience? >> well, i would be curious to
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hear ed for sure's perspective, outside looking in. and i would say watching the faa executives wrestle with the difficult decisions that they were forced to make was not pleasant. but i would say the current administrator is very accurate in pointing out that the faa is a wonderful operational organization. ops is our job, and ops is our business, business is good, right? we're not a real great planning organization. so i would think that you would naturally default, if you were in his shoes, to say that i'm graded every minute of every day on ops. naturally, if i was given a choice, to strike the 10% from modernization, which would be the entire budget. all right? essentially. so you would totally abandon anything towards modernization.
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>> that's what a lot of the spirit would have. >> i'm not sure that gets to the heart of it. but i'm sure it wasn't any more pleasant for anyone else to watch than me. any thoughts there? >> well, i think flexibility is important. i had an opportunity last week to be in oshkosh, and hear michael wearta talk about the faa and the upcoming faa reauthorization. i think he laid out three key priorities for the faa as they move forward. and that is stability, funding, and flexibility. and i think that gets to the heart of what you're bringing up there, sean. and that is, you want the ability to prioritize when you can't do everything. >> right. >> and so i think everybody understands that. i think the feeling would be, gee, let's make sure when we're doing the prioritization, our guiding principles are right. we're putting the money where
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they can best serve the broad community. but certainly flexibility will be a key part of the faa reauthorization debate. and i think that's appropriate. >> another problem that hardly ever gets mentioned is that there's a looming deferred maintenance. >> right. >> with the faa. it's several billion dollars and growing. that's one of the things that's easiest to put off when funding is tight. you've got operations, you have to maintain, and you're trying to do as much modernization as you can. well, okay, the deferred maintenance, let's leave that to another year. and that's how it builds up over time. eventually that has to be coped with. there's no plan that anybody that i know is aware of for doing anything about that. except hoping that things will be better somehow in the future. that's not a plan. >> and i think that the real reason everyone came to the table for our working group is after 2013, we had to find a
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better solution to be able to fund our system. >> absolutely. that was the one thing that the group could clearly -- i was joking about the mason-dixon line and everything else. we agreed we have to do something. because we cannot relive that nightmare again. we can have a situation we're relying on 23 crs to keep stable funding levels. we simply cannot do that. and we certainly can't have a situation where we lay off a bunch of controllers and then start lowering the capacity of the air space to maintain aggregate safety levels. >> and eventually shutting out a lot of smaller towers. >> right. >> i'm john rosenberg with delta airlines air safety committee. i think my question is more appropriately directed to mel. this, mel, has to do with an equipment question as far as next gen. it's my understanding now that faa has put out a mandate for aircraft owners that by 2020,
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now we have to have our airplanes equipped with the aba out, which places a pretty good size burden on the airport side of it. from a financial standpoint, equipment manufacturing standpoint, and of course with the avionics shops, and gear up for the influx of installations. so my question is, from the ground end of it, will you guys -- based on all that i'm hearing about funding issues, and i hear the word languishing, will the ground end of it be in sync with the requirement to have that by 2020, you know, along with the airborne part of it? will you guys be ready for that? >> that's a great question. and it really -- the mandate had been a driver, a strong driver of the atc modernization side. so we look at -- there's currently -- it's embarrassing to admit that we have 98
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facilities that still currently use monochromatic radar screens. and so we send our young -- our best and brightest individuals through universities, these incredible labs that have 360-degree, equivalent to a motion-based high category simulator, and then deploy them to a facility and say, by the way, here's your black-and-white tv. it is a monumental lift to force in one second updates that adsb will provide into the automation systems. it is way harder than we thought it would be. we're certainly on pace to not only meet that, but be well ahead of it. and the result of that will bear fruit in many different areas. one example would be the tension, the constant tension between radar surveillance and route structure.
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could we put routes closer together. we have to think about 1 million-pound plane flying at -- we don't want to get too close. one-second updates and what we call fusion now, where you look at areas of terrain. you see much better what's going on down near the ground. or eliminate gaps in radar coverage. some very exciting stuff that's going on. but i'll tell you, there's some people working real hard on the atc side for those mandates. >> thank you very much. >> you bet. >> ben strutman with alpha air traffic service. speaking of deferred maintenance, is there any more talk about combining air traffic control facilities? i know there's political road blocks to that. >> yeah, yeah. >> seems like a -- >> what was it? yeah, no, in the technology, really, it's driving some wonderful opportunities. there's a reason why facilities
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were located very close to the radar, right? that doesn't exist anymore. we're g.o. independent. then it allows you to have a discussion, an honest discussion, unconstrained about what's the right density. and the deployment road map, what it looks like. politically what we have said as a union, as an organization representing employees is, now is the time to have that discussion. maybe even five years ago it was time to have that discussion. we've been participating in it for that long. because we're literally resetting a generation of the work force. so if one of your political road blocks is, i've got two kids and they're in school, and my wife says we're not moving, now is the time to -- there's a lot of guys that have gray hair like myself and there's a lot of incredible young individuals that are just starting families. so there's no better time politically to have that discussion. there's no better time technologically to have that discussion. the discussions are ongoing. then what you start to come back
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to, and bob i'll be a softball for you, buddy, is the constituent situation. that's my tower, that's my backyard. i'll stop talking and leave it for bob. >> we're all in on this one. that is a real political constraint. members of congress really hate to give up, even a facility that has two people in their district. it's jobs in the district. they just live and breathe to protect those. and yet as mel says, the technology now makes it possible, particularly since so many of the facilities have so much deferred maintenance, they really should be replaced. but if you replace all of them where they are today, we're going to waste a fortune. we can't afford to do that. coming up with a sensible consolidation plan that puts new -- all new facilities, or in many cases new facilities to replace several old facilities, really makes sense. and as mel says, now is the perfect opportunity, the time to plan that, and to hire people with the idea that they're going
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to need to be flexible, in where they're going to work five years from now, and so forth. >> and maybe ed has something to add to it from a business perspective, but i was facility represent in california when the wildfires burned up to the side of the building and the janitor literally saved the day by turning on the sprinklers. you know, the irrigation outside. we deployed to nearby locations, and maintained -- i think we had 80% ops for four days or something like that. we've got to maintain that type of resiliency. there's too many things that could happen. but regardless of whether i'm thinking public or private, i'm looking to ed from an investment perspective, is not easy to justify buying a bunch of new stuff. they've invested a significant amount of money in faa to evaluate all that, what's your return on investment, those are
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heavy, heavy lifts, talking 20, 25 years before you see a return. >> the interesting thing is, even congress has agreed, we need to move forward with consolidation. we need a consolidation plan. if you look at the last faa reauthorization bill, there was a section 804 that called on the faa to come forward with a consolidation plan. i think everybody in industry supported it. i think nafca supported it. we recognize the conversation going on here, that we need to build for the future, and that may mean taking steps away from the past. it means consolidation. and i think the part that is missing on this is exactly what does that word mean. how do we get there from here. what's the plan, what's the cost, what's the timing. and i think all of us have urged the faa to move forward smartly with a plan. share it with the community and
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let us become advocates for it. we've hopeful that will happen. >> i think -- i had the good fortune to actually visit one of the first -- the facility up in salt lake. it was pretty phenomenal. they're going from the legacy system, that scopes, the monochromatic scopes, and the piece of paper going back and forth, and going to a fully digitized system, where if you were to have a crisis like that, a forest fire, some kind of natural disaster, you can basically switch the full control function from one facility to the other one. which is just an absolutely phenomenal thing. i think that's another great example. there's some of the redundancies built in through the use of this technology. >> that core infrastructure going in is critical. and fortunately flexible enough that we'll be able to leverage it later. i think it comes to the point, what is your definition of next
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gen and where are we on that continuum. i would say, if you think about the 20-year cycle, and the $20 billion taxpayer dollar investment, we're about ten years taxpayer investment, wire about 10 years in, about $5 billion $5.5 billion. we have got a lot of core infrastructure, a lot of great opportunities, it's the what next and how type of thing, is probably the biggest argument, based on perspective. >> i wonder if the safety case can be made for happier and safer controllers at facilities that are not dark all the time. if you have ever seen some of the scandinavian controllers. >> the requirement of that low light situation, but you're right, once you are exposed to options, generally, you see some
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incremental benefits and they start to pick up a little bit more rapidly. so there's a lot of facilities that deploy that, and once you deploy those nice bright monitors. >> you hit on the incremental changes and one of the big frustrations that sometimes we all share, is the fact that we keep on talking about nexgen like it's something very futuristic, and maybe we don't spend enough time focusing on the incremental changes that we're focused on now. getting back to the opening conversation that we had when we started off the panel, we're talking about funding, decision making, governing and everything else. are we actually making enough incremental change through the deployment of the technologies,
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now, it's about minute and a half, two minutes, squirrel! it's really tough to maintain enthusiasm in relation to or to me anything perspective of where you are in history, so i would say there are incredible efficiencies that are literally at our fingertips and could be populated through -- or could be disbursed throughout the mass and done immediately. it's -- do you do that now and abandon some of the more advanced concepts? how do you balance that? it's really tough. >> i think that to your point, shaun, there are changes happening all the time, whether it's reducing vertical separation, and one day we flipped a switch, and we effectively doubled the capacity of our air traffic control system, flight level 290.
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so change does happen, it's happening and we don't always talk about it, we don't always highlight it, but, frankly, the american dna is never to be satisfied with where we are, right? so i don't anybody's satisfied with where we are today or at the pace at which -- here we want to do more, we want to do better, and all of us here are committed to doing that. what we're talking about are structures that may get us the best opportunity to move forward. and in doing that, let's month forward and not lose sight of where we are today. within our dna, we want to go farther, we want to go safer, we want to go more efficiently, we want to be where the world's best. >> i wanted to take a look, a slightly different spin on that
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there's another kind of change that's been very important and very positive in terms of nexgen. this has brought great diversity of aviation stake holders to work together to bring some kind of workable consensus on a whole lot of issues. we have really never had that before, in the history of all that airport reform. we have been in disagreement on various aspects. it's the first time he got -- figure out how to work together, for the greater good that doesn't necessarily get everybody's first choice of everything, but you reach workable compromises that move the ball forward that everybody can live with. i see that as kind of a
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prototype for what a stake holder board of directors could be, that it obviously is not going to have as many people, but a much smaller number of them representing everybody to do the same kind of process, to do the policy, not an advisory, but a policy making body for a reform of air traffic system and their navigation service provider. there's a lot of learning that's gone on in that process that shows -- it's not inconceivable, it might have looked like 10 or 15 years ago, but it is conceivable because we have seen it work on this kind of a scale. >> any comments? >> i would just echo what they had to say, i think that we have made some strides, and in the american dna we can do better and we have seen other country us do better than us and i don't think we're ever satisfied with that. >> my experience from working
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around the nak, could be on the nak subcommittee. it could like up with what you said, bob, because when i first got there, we had a bunch of different stake holders looking at 35 different core programs and technologies associated with nexgen. it's like asking 40 people what flavor pizza they like and you're going to get 40 different answers. it wasn't a technical issue, it was not a technological question, it was a leadership improvisation question, and i think looking in the context of what was happening in the agency is important as well. we were an aviation administrator, wearing a bunch of different hats. we have a full-time administrator, we have a deputy administrator who's one of their core focuses is nexgen we have the assistant -- general bolton
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and we have leadership and decision make. surface operations, data com, run way operations and pvm. i can see getting immersed in this stuff to present. sometimes at the end of the day, money is always going to be important, but sometimes it's more important to cuss how you use the money. technology is really important, but sometimes we're dealing with nontechnical barriers to move this process forward. so at the end of the day, it comes to leadership, it comes to stable funding, it comes to vision and it comes to folks who have that dna, that have the attitude that we continue to be the safest, most high performance air traffic system in the world. we're talking a lot about
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norwegian air shuttle, about maintaining our competitive advantage, in my neck of the woods, it's equally important that we do so with regard to how we manage our air space. i'm looking forward to our next speaker and the closing ceremony and please join me in giving a hand to this panel, i hope you enjoyed it. with live coverage of the u.s. house and the senate on c sparks 3, we complement that coverage by showing you congressional hearings and public event. cspan 3 is the home to american history tv. including six unique stories, the civil war's 150th anniversary, visiting battle fields and key events.
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