You Need to Know What You Don’t Know"
Marion C. Blakey,
Aero Club
Good afternoon, and thank you, Debbie [McElroy]. It’s a special pleasure to be
here. It’s a very special pleasure to pay tribute to one of the greatest pilots
of our time — of all time. The Engen Trophy is certainly well deserved.
Normally, when you don’t know what to talk about with folks you talk about the
weather. Well, today’s a little bit different. I know exactly what I want to
talk about and that is the weather. Now I look around the room, and I see a few
of you saying, “Oh, man, I was hoping she was going to give us some insight on
the Trust Fund and Reauthorization or maybe Age 60.” Nope. And those of you
with an allergy to acronyms better head for the exits. What I’m going to focus
on today is what I think is one of the top two or three operational and
research challenges we face but often is sort of the Rodney Dangerfield of
aviation and doesn’t get enough attention or respect.
For those of you who are unaware, today is the anniversary of the start of
Admiral Byrd’s flight over the South Pole. The year was 1929.
November 28 is also the anniversary of another fairly significant
transportation event: Back in 1520, Magellan reached the Pacific Ocean from the
Generally speaking, the conditions were roughly the same for both men. The
geography was the same. One explorer had better information. Both brave. Both
determined. Byrd’s flight wasn’t what I’d call easy by any stretch, but it
shows how a little information can go an awfully long way.
No doubt the pilots in this room feel precisely the same about weather. In
fact, weather is a contributing or causal factor in 87 percent of all GA
accidents. Moreover, just about three out of four airline delays over the last
five years are attributed to Mother Nature.
Now, I’d be remiss not to mention the success we had with Thanksgiving weekend
traffic. We had good weather, but as always, there was quite a spike in the
amount of traffic. Sunday was up 16 percent. And when it was all done, I can
say with certainty that everyone ran a ship-shape operation. Hats
off. When we needed a clutch performance, we got it.
You may be surprised to know that playing a part in this was our airspace flow
program which we put in place to handle difficult enroute weather patterns.
Yeah, I know it was good weather, but over the weekend, we used it for the
first time to handle high volume at high altitudes on the East Coast. The corridors from D.C. to
The airspace flow program itself has been in place since June, and the early
results are good. Preliminary data indicate delays during severe weather events
have been reduced approximately 21 percent for flights destined to airports in
the eastern U.S. Data also indicate a decrease in the number of cancelled
flights, about eight percent on severe weather days. We expect that that will
translate to a savings of $900 million over the next 10 years.
This program is designed to address delays associated with airspace
constraints. There was a time that ground delay programs were implemented for
multiple airports in response to severe weather. Working with industry, now for
the first time we’re able to provide options to ground delays with predictable
results. When the customer gets an option whether to file through or file
around, it’s a good sign for both of us.
As the saying goes, you can’t control the weather but you can control how you
deal with it. Just like Admiral Byrd, just like Magellan, step one is to be
aware of it, to have the best information out there.
So where are we? There’s some very exciting work being done with measurements
in the troposphere, the lower part of the atmosphere. Much of our forecasting
since the early 1920’s has involved the deployment of weather balloons. Now,
there are 69 spread across the country with information coming every 12 hours,
capturing atmosphere data.
Today, we’re also able to capture atmospheric measurements from several hundred
commercial aircraft through a program called Meteorological Data Collection and
Reporting System. You may know it by its abbreviation: MDCRS. In fact we get over
a hundred thousand observations per day of winds aloft, temperature, pressure,
and turbulence from this program. Participating airlines collect the data for
us at no cost and share the cost with the government to get the data to the
ground. ARINC then sends it on to FAA and NWS to improve the forecasts and our
automated air traffic support tools.
On the downside, this program doesn’t give us humidity, but there’s a company
called AirDat that’s in the early stages of what one
day might plug that hole and bring aviation a little more quickly into the 21st
century. With a program called TAMDAR, for Troposphere Airborne Meteorological
Data Reporting; they’re placing a multi-function atmospheric sensor aboard
aircraft and they’re using a dedicated two-way satellite link through Iridium
to get the objective information relayed to meteorologists. The sensor is
smaller than a lunch box and weighs less than two pounds. The transmission
takes about 8 to 12 seconds.
As you know, data collection below 20,000 feet had been lean. By outfitting
smaller commuter aircraft, we’re getting input from an entire fleet, quite a
jump from balloons. The cost-benefit piece of this equation has yet to be
fleshed out, but a good idea is a good idea.
And sometimes, the simple ideas are the best ideas. The sensors record
humidity, pressure, temperature, winds aloft, icing, turbulence, true airspeed
and location, time, and altitude from a built-in GPS. It’s been operational in
the central
Let me turn to an FAA project: the Collaborative Convective Forecast Product.
The CCFP has been around for a few years at http://aviationweather.gov
<http://aviationweather.gov/> . No www; just aviationweather.gov. During the
convective weather season, which stretches from March through October, a team
of government meteorologists, our center weather service unit staff and the
airlines put out a forecast every two hours, round the clock, 24/7. This is
information that goes to everyone, available to anyone who needs it. If you’re
looking for news, here it is. We’re expanding. Right now, the forecast looks
out six hours. We’re looking at going to eight. We’re increasing the strength,
the reliability, of the forecast with better software.
Working collaboratively is definitely the way to go. At the heart of
collaboration is traffic flow management. On one hand, you have air traffic
control which is all about controllers and separation. Air traffic control
begins when an aircraft pushes back from the gate, and it ends when it pulls
back in. Traffic flow management, on the other hand, is more the science of
aviation. It’s about understanding how traffic flows across the system, how the
system moves and adapts nationwide.
The
This is all part of collaborative decision making in which the government and
users make good decisions together, instead of decisions made against each
other in vacuum. Collaborative decision making is a lot like the World Wide
Web. The more information you get in response to your search, the better it
gets. Richer and richer information, allowing everybody to
make better decisions for the day.
Now we’re not stopping there. Our laboratories are producing new products as
well. For example, after several years of development and testing, we are
scheduled to roll out an operational in-flight icing product that GA has been
especially eager to see. For several years now, you told us you wanted the
ability to use the Current Icing Product Severity as an operational tool. Well,
in two months or less, in time for much of this icing season, CIP Severity will
be fully operational. This product combines observations from satellite, radar,
surface, lightning networks, and pilot weather reports with model output to
provide a detailed, hourly, three dimensional diagnosis of in-flight icing
conditions and potential for super-cooled liquid droplets.
In one sentence, our goal is to enable flight deck weather information
technologies that allow pilots to engage in shared situational awareness.
I’ve just run though a laundry list that shows we’re taking weather seriously
today. But it’s a fair question for one of you to ask, “That’s good, but what
about tomorrow?”
We’re hard at that, too. The next generation air transportation system — NextGen — is going to answer the mail.
The challenge of weather is arguably the biggest and most complex we face. It’s
the wild card that’s always going to be out there. The fact of the matter is we
just don’t forecast very well. That’s not an indictment of the meteorologist.
It’s an observation about the state of the science that enables us to peek into
the future. It’s one thing when you’re planning the family picnic for next
Saturday. But when you’re trying to vector thousands of aircraft from point A
to point B — and I’m not just talking about into O’Hare or Kennedy, but at the
smaller airports as well — that type of choreography requires an accurate
picture several days out.
We can’t do it. And even with all of these steps, we’ll never completely do
away with constraints on the system. Let’s face it: weather’s always going to
be there to deal with.
I’m not bursting your balloon — weather or otherwise — but what I am pointing
to is that we need to make a cultural shift in our approach to the weather.
First, there’s got to be a shift in how forecasting itself
is perceived. As the forecasts get better, people have to take more stock in
them. That comes from being able to rely on the information you’re getting.
Everybody jokes about the weatherman, but you and I know that comes from the
reflex that he’s going to get it wrong. That’s got to change, and I think it
will as products and forecasts become more reliable. In addition, I opened my
comments with the mention of how good information needs to be available. And
that’s true. We need to change how the national airspace system responds to and
utilizes the weather information that’s produced.
The NextGen vision is to assure that everybody in the
system has the same set of information. When there’s a weather-related event,
everybody would have knowledge of it, and they’d be aware at about the same
time. The challenge for us — and you — is to change the NAS from being a system
that’s reactive into one that’s proactive. Instead of waiting until after
something’s happened and using an operational tool such as a ground delay
program, we want to make smarter risk-based decisions before the event has
occurred. We want to take that weather information and use it to formulate
actions that are less painful, less dramatic, and further out. The further out
in time we can make strategic operational weather decisions, the less impact NextGen will endure.
We need a network-enabled common weather picture of now as well as one, two,
and six hours from now. Everybody in the system right now is making decisions
based on different pictures and different interpretations of those pictures. A
network gives everyone the same look.
To get there, you can’t have only one weather provider for observations and
forecasts. We want to have many sources, as many as we can get. As I said, one
of the real science challenges is how do you then fuse all that data in to a
single picture and continuously distribute it to everybody. Our concept for
that is called NNEW — NextGen Network Enabled
Weather.
There’s good news here. We’re already working with DoD,
Commerce, and NASA to leverage their investments in this capability. This will
help us launch sooner: The delivery for an initial capability is scheduled for
2012.
When all this information becomes available, and it gets to you in time for you
to use it, well, that’s the kind of leap into the next century of aviation that
we need to make. Secretary Mary Peters calls it 21st century solutions to 21st
century problems, and I think she’s right. In 1929, the very same year of
Admiral Byrd’s famous flight, the government’s Interdepartmental Committee on
Civil Airways was urging the Aeronautics Branch to strengthen its
weather-reporting services, particularly in terms of collecting weather data.
This issue isn’t new, but our approach sure is.
Because we are working together to organize our weather efforts from research
and development to the systems we use every day to make sure we’re addressing
the right weather problems and coming up with the right solution. It’s true
that there’s probably not going to be a next generation air traffic control
system that’s immune to the headaches of convective weather. But a little
information can go a long way. And when you get the right information to the
right people at the right time, advancements are sure to follow, without having
to use the Straits of Magellan to do it.
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