I haven’t heard much about it lately but given the importance FAA has placed on users equipping with ADS-B technology, I have to assume that the “Best Equipped, Best Served” (BEBS) strategy is still under active consideration. As I understand the situation, the driving force behind the BEBS policy is the absolute conviction within the aviation technical community that the capability for an aircraft to transmit its own precise GPS based position to the ATC system will immediately produce significant increases in ATC efficiencies and is fundamental to achieving the NextGen vision and promise. Therefore, the reasoning goes, it’s essential that the entire inventory of IFR capable aircraft be equipped with ADS-B as quickly as possible or NextGen will fail, hence the FAA mandate requiring aircraft to have ADS-B (out) to operate in all airspace currently requiring a transponder by CY 2020. The BEBS policy is simply an attempt to “incentivize” compliance with the mandate. It should be noted that most people with a thorough understanding of actual ATC operations question the basic premise of the argument. (NOTE: Let me just say that, in my opinion, the actual fundamental enabling technology critical to achieving NextGen capabilities is neither navigation nor surveillance but rather advanced communications technologies that go far beyond the simple transfer of data to the real-time delivery of tactical information and ATC clearances. But that’s a topic for a later blog)
Let’s get back to Best Equipped, Best Served. According to Dr. Phil, people don’t do anything unless they perceive some sort of benefit in doing it. Operators with flight operations over the Gulf of Mexico, Alaska, or other locations that do not have existing radar coverage will eagerly equip with ADS-B so they can gain the economic benefits of ATC radar procedures. That’s not the problem. The problem is with operators having flight operations in the remaining 99% of the airspace that has full radar coverage. Their ADS-B benefits are negligible at best, so why equip? The argument that they will receive operational benefits in later stages of NextGen is not very convincing; besides, they’ve been burned by that line before. How do you encourage these operators to equip? Best Equipped, Best Served?
The FAA BEBS strategy is intended to create artificial ADS-B benefits in order to encourage users to equip. The BEBS concept, as I understand it, is that aircraft equipped with ADS-B will receive the most efficient routings through the most efficient airspace to land on the most efficient runways with the least ATC delay, while non-equipped aircraft will be forced to bear the economic burden of operating with a reduced level of service. If FAA was in the business of selling ADS-B systems, withholding ATC benefits, features, and capabilities would be a great marketing approach, especially as the monopoly ATC service provider. I think I’ve seen movies where certain organizations used that kind of “convincing” to sell protection services to small businesses in the garment district. Or, it could be that old “run government like a business” stuff again. Microsoft would love to do something like that except for those damn government people at the U.S. Department of Justice.
It should also be noted that BEBS policy is addressing airspace usage and runway assignments, with ADS-B equipage being completely irrelevant to those operations. Therefore, under BEBS, non ADS-B equipped aircraft operators would be penalized for failing to equip their aircraft with irrelevant equipment. What’s wrong with that picture?
Because FAA is the monopoly ATC service provider with the power of The Mandate, let’s assume that BEBS becomes the policy of the land. Now imagine air traffic controllers working actual traffic. Controllers consider the traffic under their control and, based upon the aircraft types, arrival/departure fixes, runway and taxiway limitations, standard procedures, parking areas, and other factors, run the traffic in a way that gets all the aircraft on their way or on the ground as expeditiously as possible. Under BEBS, an additional consideration would be if the aircraft is or is not ADS-B equipped because that will define the quality of service to be provided. This additional factor would create a whole new family of operational requirements and restrictions for the controllers, be a huge increase in controller mental workload, and probably create an operationally chaotic control environment sufficient to significantly decrease terminal capacity and increase delays. Not a good unintended consequence.
For the BEBS policy to be effective, it would also have to prohibit controllers from giving any of the reserved “best” service to non-ADS-B equipped aircraft operators under any circumstance because “free” benefits would undermine their incentive to equip. In that situation, one assumes that controllers would be expected to intentionally not use the full capacity of the airport and associated airspace (i.e., decrease capacity) to demonstrate to operators the economic cost of less efficient services as a simple matter of enforcing the BEBS “encouragement” objective. Is this beginning to bother anyone yet?
Finally, BEBS means that the U.S. government would deny non-felon U.S. citizens (and others) access to open public airspace without justification. Or is there some justification? Does ADS-B provide a significantly higher level of safety than radar? To what degree? Where was the rigorous analysis, documentation, and public debate of BEBS? Or is the BEBS concept based completely on the undocumented and unsubstantiated speculation that ADS-B is fundamental to achieving unspecified NextGen operational capabilities? I’m certainly no constitutional lawyer but it seems to me that depriving citizens of their liberty to utilize public airspace without cause or due process of law just might be a violation of the 5th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. At the very least it seems like a Federal abuse of power. Don’t know, just sayin’.
These are just the most egregious issues surrounding BEBS. My first question is who brought this idea up in the first place? More importantly, who was the first person to approve it as an official government strategy? How did it get to be an officially endorsed strategy of the FAA Administrator? Did anyone run the idea past General Counsel to confirm its legality and constitutionality? Did anyone run it by the Congressional Affairs office since it clearly has political “Big Government”, “Anti-business”, “Freedom”, “Liberty”, “Government Intrusion”, etc. implications? Lastly, did anyone consider the operational issues associated with the execution of the policy; the ones that the old independent Air Traffic Service would have raised to keep this terribly flawed policy from ever surviving the first discussion? Apparently not.