NextGen’s Moment

For the White House, the effort known as NextGen to transition air traffic control to a super-efficient, satellite-based system has become a silver-lining moment.

For most Americans, NextGen was a meaningless term barely two months ago. What they know all too well, however, is that the economic crisis is a black cloud over the nation that has left millions of Americans jobless. So in his speech to Congress in September unveiling his American Jobs Act, President Barack Obama presented NextGen as part of a package of new transportation and infrastructure program opportunities that would boost economic health and job creation. “Building a world-class transportation system is part of what made us an economic superpower. And now we’re going to sit back and watch China build newer airports and faster railroads?” the president asked.

The president’s plan includes $50 billion in immediate investments for highways, transit, rail and aviation to modernize infrastructure. NextGen specifically would get an extra $1 billion to fast-track the program as a jobs program that will also stimulate economic growth.

Linked to this, the US Dept. of Commerce is creating a new committee that will target opportunities to promote and sell NextGen technologies and products to non-US markets.

Announcing the NextGen Vendors Group (NVG), Dept. of Commerce principal deputy assistant secretary Maureen Smith said that through NVG, Commerce will reach out to industry and other agencies to identify overseas market opportunities.

After all, given the global nature of aviation, NextGen is unlikely to reach its full potential absent coordination with ATC modernization initiatives around the world, particularly the European Union’s Single European Sky–ATM Research (SESAR) program.

Smith, who unveiled the NVG at a NextGen Institute annual public meeting and industry day in Washington in September, said the group would also identify any specific trade barriers that stand in the way of NextGen product sales and work to remove them.

Aerospace Industries Assn. president and CEO Marion Blakey has welcomed the move. “This is something we can certainly use as we move into the international arena. We need advocacy of government,” Blakey said.

So NextGen partners—government agencies, industry, airlines and airports—have what will likely be a one-off opportunity to push the program beyond the quagmire of acronyms, funding disputes and diverging goals in which it has been mired for some eight years. Another over-riding problem that the program has suffered is its lack of clear and tangible payoffs to those outside of the specialized core of NextGen Institute partners. Most Americans have no idea that the GPS technology in their cars is more sophisticated than the ground-based, 1950s-era technology that is used to safely fly them to their Thanksgiving reunions.

Three elements are critical to leveraging the opportunity that has been provided to NextGen. First is fast action; the White House urgently needs to show results on its jobs plan, so any investments it makes must deliver quickly. Second is financing; given the precarious financial state of most US airlines, the Dept. of Transportation and FAA must tackle the issue of creative financing that would allow at least the majority of airlines to jump onboard sooner rather than later. And third is public promotion; NextGen has to be packaged as an exciting, high-tech endeavor that lays out the benefits in real terms and attracts new innovators and investors.

An idea related to this was raised by Boeing Commercial Airplanes (BCA) president and CEO Jim Albaugh, who told the Aero Club in Washington that the US should make the creation of a next-generation air traffic management system a rallying project that maintains the country’s position as a global leader in the aerospace industry.

Albaugh said he feared the US aerospace industry faced “an intellectual disarmament” as its skilled workforce retired, became unemployed, or moved to countries that offered better job incentives.

Albaugh said that turning NextGen into a major US aerospace project would dramatically improve air transportation and make airlines 15% more efficient.

“We need to think big and we need to think bold,” Albaugh said. He is right, but there’s something else: NextGen partners also need to think fast.