The FAA's view on collision avoidance

The first, and probably most important thing you should know is that the FAA will NEVER, and I mean never, adopt any proprietary system. They got burned badly in the early 50's (?) with altitude encoding and will never do it again. You are not the first one to expend time, effort, and brainpower to a problem and not make a dime off it.

Second, there is no shortage of technical solutions.  I worked in the FAA from '70 to '80 and collision avoidance was a hot political issue. There were proposals dating back to the early '50's, mostly unworkable.  In 1975 we tested the RCA, McDonnell-Douglas, and Honeywell systems. RCA was trash, McDonnell was way too expensive and Honeywell was brilliant.  It had problems at first but after a few modifications it was unbeatable, even in the densest traffic you could imagine.  There were also many transponder-based systems, most without merit. The better our results got, the more nervous our management got. We were finally directed to quit. The basic truth is that the FAA will not accept a collision avoidance system, no matter how good.  It would be a threat to their vast ground-based empire.  If there were an effective and widely implemented CAS, we could turn off the low altitude system.

Third, unless you are going into s TCA, the FAA doesn't give a damn if your transponder works.  In busy areas the controller pushes a switch which suppresses all VFR codes. This will be a shock to some guy who has just laid out maybe $1,000 for a transponder and altitude encoder, but it's true.

Actually, the system works pretty well in good weather. Bad weather is the main cause of delays. Any well-developed storm front has up/down drafts that will tear the wings off any airliner. When a major airport sustem like New York or Chicago goes down, it affects airports hundreds, even thousands, of miles away. Another problem is the shortage of runways, exacerbated by the airlines' practice of hubbing and spoking. A modern jetport is a multi-billion dollar deal, is noisy and most people don't want to either have it or pay for it. I know this sounds a bit negative, but I've been there, done that for the last thirty years. I really don't know a soul in the present FAA with any authority. I do know that the FAA will not change its mind on anything.

Tom Amlie