<B> Study Slams FAA On Y2K</B>
By Barbara Cook
<I>Washington</I> - A new study that criticizes FAA's resolution of Y2K issues that impact the air traffic control system predicts that, even without interruptions to the ATC system on Jan. 1, the nation's airlines could lose $400 million due to declining public confidence in the system.
Generated jointly by aviation consultants The Boyd Group and RMB Associates of Evergreen, Colo., the report, "The Y2K Threat to Air Traffic Control," concludes that "despite the happy face put out by the FAA, our findings are not comforting. There almost certainly will be ATC fallout from Y2K, and we hope it does not include airplanes."
The study's authors pointed out that "while most agree that the potential for a complete system meltdown due to Y2K is not very likely, even the FAA admits that problems could exist."
The authors stressed that "the ATC system will probably work fine with only minor problems after the New Year. But when thousands of lives are at stake, 'probably' is simply not good enough."
An FAA spokesperson for Y2K program director Ray Long declined to comment on the study. However, FAA has since met the June 30 deadline verifying that all systems are compliant, and said the next step is for an independent assessment of that data. Results of the assessment will be announced this month.
Mead, just returning from a meeting with European Union officials, had not seen the Boyd study and had no comment.
Rep. Stephen Horn (R-Calif.), chairman of the Committee on Government Reform's Subcommittee on Government Management, Information and Technology, on June 15 issued the panel's eighth "report card" on the Y2K progress of the largest 24 agencies and cabinet departments in the executive branch. While mission-critical systems overall are 94 percent compliant, up from 79 percent in February, Horn noted, certain programs, including the air traffic control system, still are not ready.
Horn spokesperson Bonnie Heald told BTN that Horn has not seen the Boyd study, but noted that he "is confident that the ATC system will be functioning well by Jan. 1." At the very least, she added, "he's confident that if there are problems, flights won't take off. It won't be a safety issue."
The Boyd study does not urge consumers to stay off airplanes on Jan. 1, but rather outlines the costs associated with the possible scenarios and suggests solutions. At the outset, the authors note that the ATC system has a questionable reliability factor at best, with old equipment occasionally leading to highly publicized outages.
While airline CEOs "gush on and on" about how well FAA is doing, the loss of public confidence in the ATC system "will result in consumers making decisions that will force a lot of airline CEOs into the boardroom to explain what went wrong," the authors predicted. This loss of confidence continues because "too many airline CEOs have yet to demand that FAA get on the stick and fix the entire ATC system problem once and for all--not just a Y2K fix, but rebuilding the entire rickety, unreliable ATC system that today is costing airlines billions of dollars in inefficiencies every year."
Already, some business entities are planning to cut back on travel during the first days of 2000, the study said--and "if this trend is not countered by concrete progress that the public can believe, it could snowball into a nasty financial situation that these same airline executives could find to be career threatening." The authors list a number of ATC projects that have encountered delays or cancellations, describing them as "FAA's history of messing up virtually every large ATC project in the past 20 years." These failures "do not bode well" for the outcome of the Y2K project, whose goal is to have the system work as well as it does today--"a really low target, because today's system performance is unacceptable."
The study praises Long and his team for taking on the project, noting that "if there are Y2K problems, it's a lead pipe cinch that the FAA will look for a scapegoat to throw under the bus." It also chides FAA for its contingency plan, which the authors said amounts to a series of steps to be taken only after some "triggering" event--"to coincide with the National Transportation Safety Board arriving at the crash site."
Officials at the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, did not respond to a request from BTN for a comment on the study. But its Y2K specialist on ATC matters Joel Willemssen in March told Horn's subcommittee that FAA has made "substantial progress" on the ATC system. However, he added that "much remains to be done" to complete all the fixes.
Additionally, Willemssen acknowledged that "the risk of failures by external organizations, such as airports and foreign air traffic control systems, could seriously affect FAA's ability to provide aviation services, which could have a dramatic effect on the flow of air traffic across the nation and around the world. To mitigate the risk that critical internal and external systems will fail, FAA needs sound business continuity and contingency plans."
The Boyd report recommends the airline industry immediately demand that Congress mandate and fund a "mini backup ATC system" of 100 workstations for the en route centers and larger approach control facilities, to provide both a system backup and a real-time integrity monitor for the primary ATC system. The report claims ATC integrity monitors "can be built around a number of readily available radar tracking software packages," whose use would "preclude the software gridlock often present in developing systems." The study projects that installation of such a backup system could be achieved for about $30 million.