A July contract award for the Federal Aeronautic Administration (FAA)’s Next-Generation Air Transportation System (NGATS) will be decided from among three players – ITT, Lockheed Martin or Raytheon – vying to build and deliver nationwide deployment of the automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) system.

A February 22 decision allowed the companies to continue developing plans for deployment of ADS-B that will culminate with the contract award, and marked approval of funding for the next phase of national ADS-B implementation by the agency’s Joint Resources Council (JRC), a team of FAA executives that reviews major acquisitions.

Requests for a proposal from each company are being extended for the program; the ADS-B is both a global positioning system (GPS), and a key component to the federal regulator’s plan to upgrade the country’s national airspace system as traffic is expected to increase exponentially throughout the next 18 years.

The FAA aims to have the infrastructure in place by 2013, all aircraft equipped by 2020, and its surveillance radars removed by 2023.

To achieve its vision, the FAA envisions a dual-track approach with deployment of the infrastructure operating in tandem with development of necessary regulations enabling ADS- B to replace radar surveillance.

ADS-B will rely on data from GPS satellites to pinpoint an aircraft’s exact location. The principle is straightforward enough: Aircraft (or other vehicles or obstacles) regularly broadcast a message including their position (i.e., latitude, longitude and altitude), velocity, and possibly other pertinent information so that other aircraft or systems can receive the information for a variety of broadly applied uses. Combined with information about an aircraft’s type, speed, direction, and flight number, pilots and air traffic controllers alike will see in real time a display of air traffic.

Doug Church, a spokesman for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA), is guardedly optimistic. "Going to a satellite-based system is great," he said. "It works very well in Alaska (where ADS-B is already in routine use under the Project Capstone testing program), but applying it to the whole system in general is another question."

While he said the members of NATCA "embrace it and want to be a party to it," he warned "one thing we are cautious about is that you still need to have a backup. We don’t want to see them decommission all the radar. We have outages regularly and have backups for when it happens, so we’re a little worried about relying too much on the technology. If a satellite gets jammed, whether by accident or subterfuge, we need to make sure we have adequate measures in place, and right now the FAA is paring things down to the bare minimum.

"Right now, there are backups when radar goes out; when a power line gets cut or a generator goes kaplooey, there are ways to track them by voice using flight strips and charting out where they are. The most important backup is in the head. There will need to be more controllers and backup should things get jammed."

While striving to heighten safety by eliminating runway mix-ups, ADS-B’s implementation will also serve to increase airspace capacity by maximizing the number of planes that can safely fly simultaneously.

"Basically we’re transitioning from relying on a ground-based system based on radar going back 30 or 40 years," explained FAA spokesman Paul Takemoto, to "using a satellite- based system using GPS to handle the doubling or tripling of traffic by 2025."

He added "we simply can’t handle that much traffic. The system today is safe, but radar degrades over distances. The GPS reliability and integrity allows us to shorten the separation standards between aircraft," which are currently mandated for a minimum of three miles near airports, and five miles at high altitudes.

The contract represents one portion of a multibillion-dollar payout to upgrade the nation’s air traffic control system. Plans call for the contract’s completion by 2014 in two phases, the first of which calls for the installation of communications equipment at ground stations in Philadelphia, Louisville and Juneau, Alaska, as well as on oil and gas platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. Areas of coverage will spread west from the East Coast to the Great Lakes region, and from Phoenix into California. Full upgrading of the air traffic control system is not expected to be completed until 2025.

Lockheed Martin’s effort includes assistance from each Sensis Corp., Harris Corp. and Honeywell International. Toward its proposed product, Lockheed Martin has reported delegating responsibilities according to the multi-disciplinary expertise of its team: Lockheed Martin itself will be responsible for ADS-B’s overall system design, integration, deployment, transition, and operations.

The company has eight years of experience in integrating ADS-B functionality into its en-route and terminal-automation systems in Alaska as part of Project Capstone (now being expanded in the state and assumed into the national program) and in the Ohio Valley as part of the Cargo Airline initiative to enhance the national airspace system.

Sensis will be responsible for the ground receiver technology. The East Syracuse, NY-based company is already familiar with ADS-B, having installed more than 750 ADS-B- compatible ground stations worldwide, including a supplement of 178 transceivers to the FAA as part of the Capstone program in Alaska and the Future Surveillance program on the East Coast, Arizona and North Dakota.

For its part, Harris will manage the interoperable exchange of cooperative surveillance data, providing network capabilities to move the ADS-B information wherever and whenever needed with security assurances. It, too, has experience with ADS-B related technology since the mid-1990s, and Lockheed Martin touts the company as "a thought leader" on the initiative due to its participation on various standards boards and committees.

Honeywell will use its institutional experience with installation, operations and management of critical infrastructure to help deploy and operate systems in the field. It will ensure integration of any provider’s avionics with ground equipment, while assisting with outreach to the aviation community.

While the FAA had expected bidders to propose a dual-frequency system to accommodate both airlines and general aviation aircraft, respectively, it also encouraged alternative solutions.

"The Raytheon team solution uses a single frequency (1090 MHz) that is becoming the standard around the world as opposed to utilizing two different frequencies, one for commercial aircraft and another for general aviation," said Andy Zogg, vice president of Raytheon’s airspace management and homeland security business.

The single frequency would transmit aircraft information plus possibly satellite weather provided by its partner XM Satellite Radio.

Also teaming with Raytheon are Arinc (for installation, operations and maintenance of ADS-B equipment through its existing network of air-ground stations); Comsoft and QinetiQ (for ground-based transmitters and receivers); and Verizon Business (for operating and monitoring its nationwide communications network).

Raytheon’s also enlisted Booz Allen Hamilton (for a commercial model of ADS-B); Intelligent Automation, (for airspace modeling and simulation); and Sun Microsystems (for off- the-shelf commercial hardware and software).

ITT of White Plains, NY, is partnering with Aerospace Engineering, AT&T, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, SAIC, Sunhillo, Thales, and WSI. By press time they had not responded to queries for comment.

Milestones for the contract reportedly include initial operating capability (IOC) for broadcast services at key sites by July 2008; approval of terminal-area separation standards in Louisville by June 2009; and en-route standards for the Gulf of Mexico by July 2009 and IOC for both surveillance and broadcast services at Louisville in October 2009 and Philadelphia in February 2010.

J.J. McCoy