In remarks to FAA employees at his first town-hall meeting last week, newly appointed FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt, addressing the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen), said, "We need to make it work. People are not going to continue to buy equipment they can't use." He committed to having a "substantial" NextGen plan by the end of the summer.

He struck the same note in testimony, also last week, before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation. He indicated that the FAA and its Joint Development Program Office (JPDO) are going to take user considerations into greater account going forward in NextGen development. Babbitt stated, "Because the realization of NextGen benefits is integrally linked to how quickly the operators equip their aircraft, it is imperative that the FAA work closely with industry on NextGen deployment. As such, the FAA has established a NextGen Implementation Task Force with the Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics (RTCA), an industry association that serves as a federal advisory committee. The task force is expected to deliver its recommendations this August on how to move forward together on implementation."

Across the Atlantic, Honeywell Aerospace of Phoenix, Ariz. was selected as the sole non-European member of the team of industrial companies, air navigation service providers (ANSPS) and airports that joined with Eurocontrol and the European Commission in the Single European Sky (SES) Air Traffic Management Research Joint Undertaking (SESAR JU) to develop the next generation of global air traffic management technology for the European air traffic management system. Airframe manufacturer Airbus is the 16th member of the SJU that was formally chartered at the recent Paris Air Show.

Honeywell will support the definition of concepts of operation, develop technologies and demonstrate operational scenarios.

The SESAR JU is the technology pillar of the SES initiative to reform the architecture of the European Air Traffic Management system.

SESAR is the rough equivalent of the U.S. NextGen ATM program with the structural difference that it now will be user-defined and driven after a near revolt by end users earlier this year - publicly acknowledged by European Union official - while NextGen is still primarily driven by the U.S. government with end-users participating in a secondary role, and only indirectly user-funded with money collected from airline excise taxes and general aviation fuel taxes passed through an aviation trust fund and supplemented with direct funding from the U.S. government general fund, reflecting the greater public benefit of a more efficient ATM system - all subject to possible legislative micromanagement and Babbitt's statements indicate he wants to avoid the type of user backlash that the Europeans experienced.

The SESAR JU will manage the SESAR development phase, scheduled to run until 2013, with large-scale production and implementation of a globally harmonized and interoperable ATM system i to be rolled out during and after the development phase. The SESAR JU objectives are to improve capacity by three times, improve safety 10 times, reduce ATM costs by 50 percent and reduce environmental impact by 10 percent.

The key to success say both Eurocontrol and FAA is interoperability - with aircraft able to operate seamlessly within European SESAR and U.S. NextGen environments. Honeywell said it was chosen because of the breadth of equipment it has installed in all categories of airplanes that operate worldwide and for their active ATM research and development program.

Technologies now being developed in Europe, many of which have counterparts in the United States, include several that will require global/NextGen interoperability:

* 4-D (3-D + time) trajectory is a cornerstone of the SESAR concept, allowing airplanes to use optimum routes by flying a precise and predictable trajectory shared by all ATM actors;