Air Force, DoD, Center move forward on NextGen

  • Published
  • By Chuck Paone
  • 66th Air Base Wing Public Affairs
HANSCOM AFB, Mass. --  As the Department of Defense formally begins participating in a massive interagency effort to transform America's air transportation system, the Electronic Systems Center here is gearing up to play a leading role.

Facing estimates that call for domestic air transportation volume to triple by 2025, Congress passed legislation three years ago mandating that key government agencies work cooperatively to plan for future U.S. air transportation needs. Public Law 108-176 directed the Departments of Transportation, Defense, Commerce and Homeland Security, as well as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, to work together on this issue.

The combined effort came to be known as the Next Generation Air Transportation System, or simply as NextGen. In late December, DoD formally established guidance for its involvement in NextGen.

"DoD must participate in the NextGen interagency partnership in a cohesive, authoritative manner," Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England wrote in the Dec. 28, 2007, memorandum. In the memo, Secretary England officially designated the Air Force as DoD's lead agency for this mammoth effort.

Even before making the official designation, DoD had asked Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne to serve as the department's executive agent. He and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley chose Senior Executive Service Member Gerald "Fred" Pease to direct the effort.

Mr. Pease immediately turned to ESC and has been discussing plans and existing capabilities with the center for some time. Now that DoD has formally charged the Air Force and has laid out clear guidance, ESC's NextGen point man, Guy St. Sauveur, says it's time to press the throttle.

"We're moving past the discussion phase; we've reached an actionable point now," he said during a Feb. 1 briefing with key leaders from ESC's 653rd Electronic Systems Wing.

"NextGen is an air transportation system, not an air traffic system," Mr. St. Sauveur noted back in August. "That's because it's far more comprehensive. It's about air traffic, but also about safety, security, weather, mobility, efficiency - and accounting for expansion needs."

As a result, ESC's participation transcends the group he works in, the 853rd, which deals primarily with air traffic control, navigation and landing systems. ESC involvement will require contributions from the entire center, he said, citing weather, mission planning and information systems as major examples of areas where "ESC can step up right now."

"NextGen presents some great opportunities for ESC to showcase its capabilities on numerous fronts, including but not limited to air traffic control and management tools," said Bruce Hevey, director of the 653 ELSW. "One of the key areas that makes ESC such a natural fit for this massive initiative is, in fact, the work that we are doing to tie massive amounts of data together in a truly net-centric fashion. For managing increasingly crowded air space, that ability will be an absolute prerequisite."

ESC is also charged with reaching beyond the center to coordinate all DoD NextGen needs, capabilities and work efforts, said Dr. Tim Rudolph, senior leader and 653 ELSW Enterprise director of Integration.

"ESC has initiated and maintained an honest broker partnership between the Air Force and the other services," he said. "The DoD memo now provides a first step to formally begin cross-service collaboration."

DoD is anxious to share and partner with the other federal departments on NextGen, too, because the military has great interest in the initiative.

"We look forward to ensuring our military mission requirements are both considered and met within the development of NextGen," Mr. Pease said. Those interests include, among others, maintaining access to special-use air space. He also noted that center is well positioned to help.

"ESC is ideally suited to deal with the technology issues called for regarding NextGen," he said.

At the senior policy level, NextGen work is overseen by a committee comprised of the secretaries of the involved cabinet departments, as well as the NASA administrator. However it's the Joint Planning and Development Office, which operates underneath the senior policy committee, that is charged with pulling things together.

That group, led by a federal executive named Charles Leader, visited Hanscom to speak with ESC leaders last summer and has been working with center staff since.

"With the signing of the DoD Memorandum for NextGen, we in the Joint Planning and Development Office look forward to continuing and expanding our relationship with the Electronic System Center," he said.

The combined team, as a first step, has been developing network-enabled operations demonstrations. The first of these looked at a potential transportation system attack in Washington D.C. Now they're working on a Gulf Coast scenario similar to Hurricane Katrina. This $15 million effort will show the capability to link together information from existing sources, on-demand and real-time, for all users of the system - civil, military, security and law enforcement.

"ESC is managing the DoD portion of this demonstration and overseeing our $5 million contribution to the effort," Mr. St. Sauveur said. These demonstrations are occasions for bringing existing Air Force and DoD technologies to the table.

"This provides us with a good chance to inventory what we have and propose our solutions as the collaborative solutions," he said. The benefit of that to DoD would be obvious. But the benefit to the nation would be equally significant.

"Why should the government pay for the same thing twice?" Mr. St. Sauveur asked. "If we've already got technologies in place that could be expanded for use by the entire military and civil aviation community, we can concentrate scarce acquisition resources and save a lot of time and money."