With the wheels of an American Airlines jet touching the runway at Bradley International Airport on an August afternoon, airspace modernization efforts took off with the first-ever commercial use of a flight procedure from General Electric Co. that allows pilots to safely calculate their own flight paths.
The new landing procedure allows pilots to use satellite-based global positioning technology to descend on a smooth and curving track to the runway, rather than using aging ground-based radar and beacons that force aircraft to fly in relatively straight lines from point to point.
One small component of the Federal Aviation Administration”™s NextGen airspace modernization plan, the technology creates what GE Aviation dubs “highways in the sky,” allowing pilots to custom-tailor approaches to reduce airport congestion, shorten trip distance, reduce an aircraft”™s time in flight and create community-friendly flight trajectories that lessen the effect of aircraft noise.
Fairfield-based GE says the technology can pare 10 nautical miles off an aircraft”™s approach relying on ground-based systems.
The GE procedure relies on so-called Required Navigation Performance (RNP) technology, which allows airplanes to navigate between two points while monitoring flight paths and pinging pilots if the plane veers off course or the system can otherwise not guarantee adherence to the flight path.
GE is working with the FAA and other regulatory bodies and navigation service providers worldwide to develop the capability for aircraft to share optimized flight trajectories with air-traffic control in real time, and to “negotiate” modifications to those trajectories when necessary. That ultimately will allow airlines to plan each and every flight to operate on the most efficient flight path with the least possible environmental impact.
Without new RNP flight paths and other essential upgrades, FAA estimates that by 2015 the current air-traffic control system will be unable to handle the 50 percent increase in airplanes and passengers expected over the next decade.
“Aircraft will have access to more direct routes and gradual descents, cutting fuel burn and environmental impact,” said Michael Huerta, deputy administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, speaking in Baltimore on the FAA”™s NextGen initiatives to modernize air-traffic control of which the GE system is a part. “By 2018 we expect that ”¦ aircraft operators will have saved more than 1.4 billion gallons of fuel because of the changes we are making.”
A former Alaska Airlines pilot named Steve Fulton is credited with developing the technology and testing it for the first time in 1996 while coming in for a landing in Juneau, Alaska. Fulton went on to co-found Naverus Inc. in Kent, Wash., to commercialize the technology; GE acquired the company in November 2009.
“RNP flight paths are an important part of a larger GE effort that is pioneering new ways to optimize aircraft operations from gate to gate,” Fulton said, in a prepared statement. “Other components of this effort include advanced features of GE flight computers, like the one aboard the American Airlines flight ”¦ which allow pilots to fly RNP paths and enable them to select pre-designated arrival times at runways and even at exact points along the route.”
