You’ve all heard the story about the dinosaurs, how they are thought to have become extinct due to a massive meteor colliding with the earth? That’s called an ELE: extinction level event. With one whopping blow, a whole species curls up and dies. GA in Australia could be facing an ELE in the form of ADS-B, if the regulators don’t apply a bit of commonsense.
Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast: one of those initialisms that uses high-falutin’ words without conveying any inkling of what they actually mean. In the simplest terms possible, ADS-B is a tell-tale little box connected to a GPS that broadcasts your position and aircraft details as you fly along. RPT planes fitted with a corresponding receiver read the info and can plan not to hit you. ATC could reduce radar services thanks to this DIY separation.
Looking out from my high-horse I see a lot of people wondering how such an innocuous little box could be GA’s death-knell, given that so many other factors have been applying destructive pressure to us in the past 10 years. In summary: the technology stands to save Airservices squllions of dollars, but only because they will transfer cost to you, the GA pilot.
The financial truth is outlined in the complex language of CASA discussion paper DP1006AS, presented to the world amongst little hoo-hah last September, and last February’s Regulation Impact Statement (RIS) on the upper-level ADS-B OUT program. Here’s a couple of zingers quoted verbatim from the RIS:
There is considerable cost shifting to aircraft operators as result of transition to satellite-based technologies.
The cost for equipage to the GA sector is $134.85 million, which is 92 per cent of the avionics equipage cost for the ADS-B program.
Those of us who diligently tore apart the White Paper when it came may remember the estimated gross domestic product of General Aviation was estimated at $279 million. You don’t need a calculator to work out that the cost to GA of ADS-B is half of the industry sector’s GDP!
But whenever the term “ADS-B” is used in Australia it usually has the words “mandate” and “subsidy” attached or not far behind. The regulators worked out very early that ADS-B wouldn’t work if there were some planes tootling around without it. The idea is that the RPT drivers can look at their screen and be confident they are seeing returns from all planes in the vicinity; to not have that confidence is to negate the benefits of the equipment. Therefore it would become necessary to mandate ADS-B fit-out for all GA planes. That’s when talk started of government subsidies to offset the cost.
Strangely, a commitment to a subsidy value seems to be missing from most of the documents that relate to the program. There was talk of $10K VFR and $15K IFR at one stage, but it looks like the need to upgrade the en-route radars anyway might have taken a huge bite out of that cake; the savings in not upgrading was supposed to fund the subsidy.
For the record, at the time of writing the only existing equipment is $22K a throw.
However, we can probably expect some level of hand-out. After the word is first uttered that’s all anyone ever wants to talk about, so it would be hard for the government to renege. That means the industry wouldn’t have to pay the whole $134.85 million, which is good because the money pool really doesn’t have that much to splash around, especially when you consider it gets no benefit from ADS-B.
That’s right: no benefit. The benefit is cost savings to Airservices and RPT. GA gets nothing from the system, yet is being asked to pay up to 92 per cent of the implementation costs. Well, we’re not really being asked ... a mandate is more about being told.
What you can ink into your crossword right now is that ADS-B will be introduced into Australia. It is new technology that the whole world is looking at, and in this global economy we can’t be incompatible with the rest of the world. But will it really bring about an increase in safety, or is it just technology for technology’s sake? I guess we won’t know until CASA fulfils its obligation to do a full safety case on the matter, which is another thing that seems to be missing from the all the reports and papers.
If ADS-B is not to impose fatal costs on GA, CASA and Airservices need to take a practical approach and find a genuinely cost-effective solution, not just one that they think is cost-effective; nothing seems expensive when you don’t have to pay it. In the amount of subsidy lies potential salvation that might mean GA evades the ELE.
The dinosaurs were lucky, they wouldn’t have known what hit them … General Aviation will have seen ADS-B coming from a long way off.
May your gauges always be in the green,
Hitch