XingR In Flight

It’s been along time since I have been motivated to write here, but my blogging friend  Don Brown along with my former brothers and sisters in arms at Air Mobility Command (I was there when it was MAC, hey I was even there when it was MATS) have prompted me to get into this Next Gen fray a little bit.  Actually, the picture Don published a few days ago pretty much says it all.

For those new to the NextGen term, I’ll be posting a few things to help you understand it and help you make your own decisions here.

Let me give you just a snapshot view right now in order to get the stage set.

Everybody (except perhaps the airlines themselves .. more on that later) claims to hate airline delays, but for years the impression was, no one was doing anything about it.

So some ‘legends’ in their own mind in Washington (actually, if you peel away all the layers you are probably going to find some Beltway Bandit or another expects to reap big profits from this) has deiced that if they “change the face” of air transportation in this country we will magically remove |airline delays| from out vocabulary.

Let me give you just one example of how this is going to work.  Let’s imagine for a moment there are just two airports in the US … LAX and JFK.  Even though these are inconveniently located for some folks, they are certainly located ideally for many, and if they are the only choices, a lot of people are going to fly between them every day.

So the airlines are going to sell a lot of tickets, buy a lot of planes and schedule them at the most convenient times to travel between those two important airports.

Seems to be going in almost a straight line, doesn’t it?  Even if you don’t now an airfoil from as fence post you are sure to figure that even if the airplanes all follow the shortest possible path between the airports, sooner or later they are going to bunch up waiting for takeoff or waiting to land.

Enter NextGen.  By using GPS and other “magic” future technologies, NextGen is going to let those planes follow any route they chose so as to get to the other end of their flight faster.

Hmm, but won’t the pilots just all chose the shortest path?  And isn’t the real problem the waiting time to take off and/or land, you ask?

Ah, clearly you have missed the point and failed to grasp the advanced technical superiority of the NextGen idea.  Or else, NextGen supporters are blowing smoke up someone’s ass.

Tune in next time to help yourself decide which explanation is true.

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