Aviation history landed Thursday at Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks.
When American Airlines flight 1916 from Dallas landed at 12:13 p.m., Bradley became the first airport in the country to receive an aircraft flown along a public flight pattern. It’s part of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Next Generation Air Transportation System, designed to make flying smoother, faster, more efficient and flexible.
“It was absolutely perfect. It put the plane in the direct right spot above the runway,” said Capt. Brian Will, American Airlines director of airspace modernization and advanced technologies, who flew flight 1916.
NextGen moves the United States from an air traffic control system based upon ground transmitters to more cost-effective satellites and technology in the planes, such as GPS. Decisions in commercial flying will shift from the ground to the cockpit.
The multi-faceted, multi-year, billon-dollar effort includes flight patterns such as Thursday’s Dallas-Bradley connection developed by private companies for public use. The aviation subsidiary of Fairfield-based GE developed Thursday’s flight pattern.
This satellite technology allows airplanes to fly more direct paths on the horizontal distance between destinations and the vertical distance to the ground. The end results are fewer delays, fewer diversions, greater flexibility in bad weather, route consistency from flight-to-flight, less aircraft congestion in the sky, flights that expend less fuel, and landing descents completed in one smooth drop rather than steep, intermediate drops that require noisy engine power.
“We are delighted to be receiving the first aircraft that has flown this path,” Bradley Administrator Eric Waldron said. “This helps us working with the airlines creating a more friendly pattern on the ground and less impact on the people here, so more community-friendly flight paths and improved safety.”
By 2018, the FAA expects NextGen to reduce flight delays by 21 percent, provide $22 billion in benefits to the traveling public, and save 1.4 billion gallons of fuel.
The core component of NextGen is the Required Navigation Performance, or RNP, flight procedure demonstrated Thursday at Bradley. The RNP provides for significantly more accurate flying that can be tailored around an airport’s local features, adjusting for weather patterns, mountains, coastlines, industrial areas and nearby residences.
Before NextGen, the FAA developed all the flight patterns between airports, the so-called highways of the sky. With RNP creating more direct flying, the FAA has a limited capacity to develop all the flight paths and is relying on commercial entities such as GE Aviation and Boeing’s subsidiary Jeppesen.
“We are about to begin divorcing aviation from ground-based navigation to satellite-based, which is much less expensive,” Will said.
Airlines have pushed for NextGen since the 1980s when new technology in airplanes made flights less reliant on ground navigation. As motorists have started to enjoy the advantages of GPS, airline pilots waited for decades to switch away from the old ground-based navigation systems.
To move the FAA toward adopting more flight patterns such as the one at Bradley, American Airlines completed a $400 million upgrade to its fleet to make them compatible with the NextGen technology. The airline also buys newer airplanes already equipped with the technology, Will said.
Bradley was chosen as the first airport for a privately-developed flight pattern after GE consulted with FAA and identified a more accurate pattern but would be relatively straightforward technically for a first demonstration, said Steve Fulton, GE Aviation technical fellow.
The Windsor Locks airport has a runway that could not be used in inclement weather because the old system of landing a plane called for greater visibility than available on overcast days. With the new procedure, airplanes can get much lower to the ground without seeing the runway and still land safely.
The new method also allows for curved descents. Previously, airplanes had to line up for a vertical approach to a runway, but now they can descend as they turn into a runway, making for shorter arrival times. The RNP works for takeoffs, too, as airplanes can curve into their intended direction more quickly.
The decreased flying time means more airplanes can fly at the same time, an important improvement since the FAA predicts passenger traffic to exceed 1 billion by 2021, a 30-percent increase over today’s civil aviation load.
Civil aviation has a $14.3-billion economic output in Connecticut, accounting for 75,526 jobs in the state. The state ranks No. 3 in civil aviation manufacturing, accounting for $9.9 billion in economic output in Connecticut.
“We are increasingly seeing more traffic in the system, and we need to upgrade ourselves for the next generation,” said Selena Shilad, executive director for the industry group Alliance for Aviation Across America.
Eventually, NextGen’s benefits of greater fuel efficiency and lower fees for the navigation infrastructure should lead to a decrease in the cost of flying. However, the initiative’s estimated cost runs near $50 billion, and U.S. Congress is mulling an airplane fuel tax to pay for the various upgrades.
A fuel tax is worth the upgrade, Shilad said, because the old system is so outdated that it negates the latest aircraft technology. The benefits will far exceed the costs.
These benefits started Thursday at Bradley. More flights can take off and land. The runways are less susceptible to bad weather. Neighbors will hear less noise coming from descending airplanes.
“It is part of the infrastructure that will stay; it is permanent,” Fulton said.
