Thursday, August 27th, 2010

While most travelers continually search for cheap airplane tickets, discount hotel rooms, or cheap vacation packages, the same travelers readily agree that everything possible should be done to make air travel safer. To that end the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) decided in 2007 to have a GPS (global positional system) built to replace radar tracking and thus vastly upgrade America’s air traffic control systems.

The FAA says that the new GPS system will be almost 10 times more accurate than radar. Controllers will have a much better sense of where all planes are, as will pilots in the air.

The disappearance of an Air France flight carrying 228 passengers over the Atlantic Ocean in 2009 resulted in more travel experts pushing for the switchover from radar based air traffic control to GPS based networks able to precisely track all planes.

Currently controllers are unable to see a plan flying over an ocean on radar until it is within 200 miles of land.

The infrastructure for a U.S. airline GPS tracking system will be in place early in 2012 but will take the rest of the decade to fully implement the entire system in every plane. By 2020 planes will be able to fly closer together which will reduce delays. Currently some planes have to fly on longer, out of the way routes across the U.S. to be tracked.

The pluses of the new GPS system include:

• Reduction in total flight delays by approximately 21 percent by 2018

• Cumulative benefits to the travelers, aircraft operations, and the FAA are calculated at $22 billion.

• Over 1.4 billion gallons of fuel will be saved during this period.

• Almost 14 million tons of carbon dioxide will not be expended.

The biggest outstanding issue is how much airlines should pay toward the very expensive cost of implementing the new GPS tracking system. Experts readily acknowledge that introduction of a GPS system is not the cure all for the airlines’ congestion problems, but it certainly is a great step forward.
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