RWM,
Of course, Mifnetters welcome and appreciate reasoned, cogent descriptions such as yours about where we are today. And yes, little progress has been made at enormous cost to both airlines and the economy in general. (The SESAR project you cite is but one example. It reminds me of several Brussels meetings at Eurocontrol dating back to the 1980’s.) But my objection is to the ongoing hectoring about “airlines could, airlines should but airlines don’t,” and “day-of,” etc., and the long and serially repetitive emails. By now, I’d venture that all on this forum have seen the same stuff more times than we care to count. My only question is, when is enough, enough? Bob Distler From: RWM--- via Mifnet <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, 16 May, 2026 18:51 To: [email protected] Cc: [email protected] Subject: [Mifnet 🛰 76180] Re: News Flash - Fuel is not the airlines largest controllable cost item With respect, Bob, airlines have been complaining about ‘ATC’ for decades. Over the same period, FAA has invested scores of billions of dollars in new infrastructure and tools, forcing airlines to spend significant sums for avionics to support the new tools. The story is quite similar outside the U.S. Also over that same period, airlines continue to drive self-induced, unmanaged congestion, driving the need for ATC intervention to provide enroute and terminal airspace separation and safety, requiring more and more infrastructure and tools, driving further spending. That’s a version of the ‘do the same things, get the same results’ problem you cite. A vicious cycle of capital destruction at both agency and airlines, while customers continue to see poor outcomes including delays, investors see reduced returns, employees become worn out by unreliable and highly variant flight timeliness, and the economy is burdened by what agencies, academics and Congress agree are billion of dollars annually in delay costs. Likewise in Europe where SESAR and improved ATC are nothing more than aspirational goals. The root cause problem and opportunity to improve ‘ATC’ system performance and airport throughput, effectively expanding capacity, is by preventing unmanaged, self-induced congestion, rather than forcing ATC to fix congestion by issuing vectoring, reroutes, and delays. Addressing root cause reduces the need for ATC intervention, infrastructure, and controller workload, while capturing and allowing utilization of latent system capacity. Also improves customer, investor, employee and national economic outcomes. The solution is to incentivize (or mandate) airlines to real-time manage their own day-of-flight 4D trajectories, system optimize aircraft flow, sequencing and spacing to their own business rules, using their own realtime information about their own resource statuses, possible for decades. Allow ATC to real-time broker multiple carrier system optima to generate a global system optimum. Demonstrated possible and commercialized for more than a decade. If these facilities had never been demonstrated and independently validated as producing meaningful on-time improvements and flying time reduction benefits — including in FAA-funded, brokered multi-carrier trials — one might say ‘pie in the sky, computationally unscalable’. The reality is the facilities are commercially available, and on the shelf for rapid deployment. Unfortunately, the vaunted $30+ billion BNATCS addresses none of this, based on which, ten years and way more than $30 billion from now, nothing will have changed except for more flights, more delays, and airlines moving on to a familiar topic, more finger-pointing. - Bob Mann Office contact: +1-516-944-0900
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