Will VORs and ILS Really Go Away?

Flying Magazine has a weekly e-mail newsletter you can subscribe to and I do. Normally, what I read there is mostly a recap of news stories that I probably heard of through one of the many aviation-related RSS feeds I follow, but this morning's had a brief article by J. Mac McClellan under the "Left Seat" banner (which I haven't yet seen posted to their website, I'll update this post with a link back to it if I see it show up there) that I thought was pretty interesting. I don't like posting someone else's content in its entirety but I think this is worth it.

Will VORs and ILS Really Go Away?

It was more than 15 years ago when Richard Collins and I met with the then head of FAA airway and navigation and planning, and he laid out a detailed plan that would have decommissioned virtually all VOR stations and ILS equipment in less than 10 years. GPS, with the added accuracy and dependability of wide area augmentation system (WAAS), was going to make navigation stations bolted to the ground unnecessary and irrelevant. Obviously, it didn't happen.

Now the FAA is talking about starting to scale back the national network of VOR stations by 2010 because GPS and WAAS are a reality and we really don't need those costly to maintain navigation radio stations. Will it happen this time? I doubt it.

It would be easy to blame the many thousands of general aviation airplane owners who have not yet installed a GPS with certified IFR capability, and the much larger group yet to embrace WAAS. And that group, through AOPA and other associations, will complain, but they are not the real drag on transition to GPS, WAAS and the next generation (NextGen) air traffic control system. The real foot dragging comes from the airlines.

Though Garmin in particular has delivered many thousands of WAAS-equipped GPS systems for personal and business airplanes, the jets, especially the airlines, lag behind. Even the best-equipped business jets have been slower to get WAAS equipment approved and installed than piston singles.

Part of the reason is that certifying anything -- particularly primary navigation systems -- is just more complicated, costly and time consuming for a transport category airplane than for a light airplane. Another issue is that the flight management systems (FMS) found in nearly every jet guide the airplane anywhere by already using a combination of inputs from GPS, inertial navigation sensors, VOR and DME to navigate. A WAAS GPS adds very little tangible capability to a jet. And because the giant majority of runways used by jets -- particularly the airlines -- have ILS approaches, WAAS adds nothing to lower approach minimums as it can at small airports served only by non-precision approaches.

When you consider the dire financial straits of the airlines, and the huge cost of putting an airplane out of service to install an expensive and redundant GPS WAAS system, the airlines' enthusiasm for WAAS is really diminished. They already have the equipment to fly direct en route to an ILS approach with minimums down to a half-mile visibility or less. No way they want to spend money for benefits that are in the future, not today.

A notable exception among the airlines is Southwest, which is spending millions to bring its fleet up to required minimum performance (RNP) capability, including WAAS, in the hope it can fly precise departure and arrival procedures and save a few miles per trip. But as far as I know Southwest is alone among the major airlines in spending millions now in the hope of getting it back in fuel savings over future years.

So, sadly, I think a combination of factors will keep the FAA paralyzed. It will announce again, and again, that it is moving on, but the primary user of the ATC system, the airlines, won't follow. Even if the FAA sets a hard deadline and warns that it will shut off VORs, and then ILS approaches, on a firm schedule, it has no credibility. It has made such announcements before and they were ignored, and the schedule was not followed.

Some wag once said that changing the ATC system is like overhauling an engine while it's running. And that's very true. So far the inertia to preserve the status quo is more powerful than any benefits of change that can't be immediately converted into cost savings. When will all of this change? I don't know, and neither does the FAA.