Southwest Airlines Flight 658 pushes back from the gate and shows up as a blip on a radar screen in the tower at Dulles International Airport just before 7:30 a.m. Wednesday.
For the next 90 minutes, the plane will move as a blip across one radar screen after another, as a system introduced in the 1950s tracked and guided its progress to Chicago.
The safety of the Boeing 737 and 118 passengers will fall to at least 10 air traffic controllers and their radar displays — at Dulles, and in Warrenton, Leesburg, Indianapolis, Aurora and Elgin, Ill., and at Midway Airport.
The limitations of that radar, which sweeps like the beam of a lighthouse, will require Flight 658 to fly miles out of its way and burn about 67 additional gallons of jet fuel. Because a jet plane can fly more than a mile and a half in the time it takes for that radar beam to come around again, the plane must be kept three to five miles from the nearest aircraft.
The pilot probably has a more sophisticated guidance system in his car than in his plane.
Now the Obama administration has embarked on the single most ambitious and expensive
national transportation project since completion of the interstate highway system: a program called the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen).
The NextGen concept sounds simple: Replace an air traffic system based on 60-year-old radar with a satellite-based Global Positioning System (GPS) network that would be far more versatile and efficient. In reality, it is an extraordinarily complex undertaking, threatened with delay by airline fears that the government will not deliver the system in time to justify their expenditures.
Read more at The Washington Post.