the subcommittee will come to order it looks like we have a few members that are coming back i have we'll start on a second round of questions let me ask you why the rulemaking is it two thousand and twenty as opposed to two thousand and nineteen two thousand and twenty one how did you arrive at the year two thousand and twenty essentially we took a look at the amount of aircraft that would have to be retrofitted and if you look at the ga community with two hundred thousand aircraft even with ten years that's twenty thousand aircraft a year that have to be retrofitted so that's a fairly aggressive schedule actually so that was pretty much one of the drivers the other component was we wanted to work with industry and demonstrate that we were going to make this investment and not pull away this is you know been brought to our attention as something that they were concerned with so we did the best we could to lay out an aggressive schedule that put that ground infrastructure in place and the best we came up with was two thousand and thirteen so technically you would equip you'd want to see that ground infrastructure in place as well so the capabilities are there starting in two thousand and ten you know we'll be putting in the ground infrastructure that this is the uplink capability but by two thousand and thirteen will be completed so really it's you're looking at seven years of using the service nationwide i'm going to ask you a couple of questions about the mr scovel talked about complemented the faa for the contract and said it's a robust contract and i want to talk a little bit about that in a second but so the just for the record and so the subcommittee members know in putting the contract together as far as the itt's responsibilities and and what needs to be accomplished and in timelines and targets who else was consulted in the process pass is represented here mr brantley at the table he has eleven thousand members that he represents the air traffic controllers are an integral part of operating the system once it's up and running and wonder if you would tell us how much input the agencies and stakeholders here were involved sure as i mentioned earlier when we set up the program office for implementation which was approximately january two thousand and six one of the first things we did was develop a governance structure in that governance structure we have stakeholders which essentially are internal to the faa both in the regulatory side and the air traffic organization so you have people from airports involved i have our safety oversight organization our the people that put together the economic analysis our policy people for the nprm on the ato side essentially all the vice presidents for the air traffic organization once a month we meet we essentially bring the program issues to the table and we discuss things and and consolidate on an answer the other piece of that that governance structure is also the at mac which started in february two thousand and six so the air traffic management advisory council essentially the steering meet and steering group established us as a work group and then that's where we meet once a month over at rtca and typically what we're doing is we develop the strategy so those strategies are basically the interdependencies of the program and the things that were in the contract basically are appealed out from that additionally what we did was as by june two thousand and six we had gone through our first investment analysis which really was a strong signal that we were funded to move forward with adsb starting at that point we in june two thousand and six we had our first industry day and we had three of those industry days where we worked with the manufacturers the people that came to the industry days and solicited information we presented and we had dialogue and all this kind of merged together to create the product as you see in the contract mr brantley we'd like to hear from you as well where either you personally or your organization or your members consultant no mr chairman we weren't you know with respect to modernization efforts we'd very much like to be involved i think our members have a lot to offer the agency but beginning about four years ago the agency informed us that our participation was no longer welcome or needed and we have not been involved since and prior to that we were involved in in the adsb program but somewhere around three or four years ago you were told that you were no longer welcome yes sir why don't you respond to them sure i would like to actually prior to the implementation phase moving forward so september two thousand and five was a key decision point for the faa to select adsb technology to move forward prior to that was the testing demonstration work that occurred up in alaska in fact what we developed there is certified bypass so we have our employees were involved with the development of the certification process and procedures for those particular elements which validated the requirements that's what basically gave the confidence in moving forward in selecting adsb over radar and over multilateral ration at that point in time that was those were the three alternatives at the conclusion of that investment decision we move forward and you know basically they moved into implementation and set up a program office and so we've been in a i would say a planning state since january two thousand and six up until this point we've gone through three additional joint resource councils which is a vest investment decisions that acquire the funding for the full program to award the contract so all the requirements that we're talking about were validated in the test and demonstration phase with the use of the employees of the effect it's troubling to me personally and i think to other members of this committee we've held hearings on the flight service station contract with lockheed martin we have held hearings on the issue of safety in the workplace in air traffic control towers and other faa facilities and it has been apparent in the past that when the administration is making decisions that they're not consulting with all of the stakeholders and i think that was noted by both the gao and i think maybe even mr scovel's predecessor and maybe even mr scovel i don't want to speak for you but there is a disconnect and i just had that discussion with a few members of the subcommittee earlier today and you're not the person that can correct that problem but certainly we need to take that up with the acting administrator it's troubling in it is not in the best interest of what we want is the final product and improving the in this case the air traffic control system let me ask mr scovel a final question in your testimony you indicate that itt will have a monopoly over providing adsb services for the next eighteen years wonder if you might talk a little bit about your concerns regarding competition and consumer issues as a result of one contractor that will be in charge and have i think in your words a monopoly over the adsb services for the next eighteen years yes mr chairman itt will have virtually a monopoly over the service the information that's generated through the adsb system faa owns the data but through the contract faa has consented to itt being able to market to package to sell that data to users who might be interested they might include air carriers our information is that ups has indicated they would certainly be interested airports as well then they would find a multitude of uses and we know that itt is certainly looking on that prospect favorably as a policy decision faa and the administration are certainly free to enter into a contract with these terms we do have concerns about the nature of the data that's being transmitted that's being permitted to be used in this fashion perhaps marketing concerns as well with competition factors we would urge faa to regulate to examine and carefully regulate if appropriate this use of data generated by the contract as it goes forward i thank you and the chair now recognizes the ranking member mr petra okay thank you very much i'm not sure if more than one member of the panel may want to address this subject but we're all pretty familiar with the radar based system and all the norad and all the different things that we have in place to try to provide security in our airspace so on how will this new system workers are separate systems or how have you is this being is there a has this been scrutinized are there ways this will enhance our security or help us to deal with the unauthorized entrance into our airspace of more effectively and this kind of thing as part of the governance structure i mentioned earlier dod participates at that stakeholders meeting that we discussed and our involvement with them is looking at ways that we can exploit the technology specific applications that have been coming up are right here in the ada so the air defense identification zone where if you are adsb equipped it's obvious who you are you have your identification and therefore you can exploit that as knowing there were friendly as opposed to worrying if they're foe same things in their special use airspace or the military operations area so there there are ways of exploiting the capability of the identification of coming off the aircraft now and being able to take advantage of it so but now their staff tells me they're worried about people pretending to be someone else or using what spoofing i guess could you i don't guess we don't want to go into what you do but you have ways of dealing with spoofers or correct in the specification it's called out that you have to have a means for independent validation of the actual aircraft that were surveilling so that means that they have another they have to have another method that's independent of using adsb the concern with spoofing deals with the power level of the signal that comes down from the satellites very low and you can perturb it and you could make it to look like something else and so it's vulnerable from that degree so what we're what we've requested in the specification is that we have independent validation of those targets and to point out that they can do that with their own means the contractor can but we also have our radars in place and so when you combine all that information you're able to validate that that target truly is who they are chair recognizes gentlemen from north carolina mr hayes the gentlemen from michigan is recognized and we'll just give him his time and not yours mr hayes how's that mr alias thank you mr costello i apologize for the late arrival but i was at another committee meeting where i'm the ranking member and i had to be there fortunately they gave up when votes came so i dashed over here mr hayes i understand has already played his user role as a staunch defender of general general aviation but there's one specific question i wanted to ask if you can have any guidance on there are a great many older general aviation planes around assessments one hundred and fifty two one hundred and seventy two one hundred and eighty two some older and some are recent i think adsb is a great thing and as a student pilot i would love to have it because it's very hard today to operate the aircraft and be aware of all the airplanes around you but i'm concerned about the cost if you have an airplane that's worth only twenty to forty thousand you think twice about adding too much to it plus many of these planes are owned by individuals who don't have high incomes if they have higher incomes they'd buy better airplanes can you give me a ballpark figure of what the cost is going to be for someone trying to put an adsb unit in an older airplane like that and i know that it'll be easy to make the transition but i still worry about the costs can you give me any figures on that sure i understand your concerns on that in fact the alaska probably provides us with the best image of what that was because there were over four hundred aircraft that got retrofitted and some of these were of the type that it wasn't just about putting in a new piece of equipment you had to make major modifications to the to the panel wiring antennas so all that provided us with enough rich information to get a good feel for it you hear us using numbers that are like 10k to 18k and when we say the 18k you're really pushing that on that's the ones that were more in you know in invasive to the actual aircraft also i would suggest that you know as we start this off there's the early adopters that are gonna end up probably paying a little bit more but over time i think the market forces will lower those prices and we speculating somewhere on the order of thirty reduction sorry are you saying that about 10k would put the basic unit in the average plan if there's not for those pardon excuse me for the general aviation type aircraft yes right okay so the thirty off that would get it down to roughly seven thousand okay thank you very much that's helpful i'll be happy to yield the remainder of my time to mr hayes thank you mr chairman mr taylor benny he worked for the government and we don't want any more six hundred hammers now six thousand you can get the box six months ago it's gone down since then i don't want to mislead people if anyone of them wants you to talk about is the levels of equipage you can equip so that you can transmit you don't have to have an expensive multifunction display to receive lots of angst amongst the aviation community because of what the faa has done to them in the past we've got we've got proof we're not doing it to them again here so talk about the levels of equipment if you're going to be a transmit and adsb guy transmit and receive and on up if you talk about that a little bit so you've heard the terms earlier called adsb out and adbs in so adsb out is you can just have the pure function of transmitting your information the new services that could be provided is basically expanding our service volume so today radars have floors and they don't see below the floors in places like alaska we learned that we can't see below the radar you can basically do them procedural separation with adsb and the way we deploy the infrastructure adsb out can now feed the air traffic controllers where they could provide air traffic control separation services so that's an example of just utilizing adsb out other examples of of applications for adsb out would be search and rescue so there's definitely an improvement in that in that case in the case of emery riddle they could use it to strictly for collecting the data on the ground and then replaying it for looking at how their student pilots are doing and and use it for training purposes now you bring it to the next level adsb in is if i'm transmitting out information that's an enabler for other aircraft to receive it and display it and that's where you get that increased situational awareness that we were just talking about so not only can you see traffic but now we have the opportunity to uplink weather to the cockpit and so you're talking about the adsb in components and it's essentially providing more information into the cockpit to increase the situational awareness which translates into safety thank you mr chairman can i carry on benny you talking over our head again but what i'm looking for is a handheld unit one thousand two hundred and ninety five out in the end it's certainly possible this is the blackberry sitting out there on the ground national airport looking at the weather over montebello knowing exactly what's going on in spite of what the guy in the front is telling us and this kind of technology given competition is absolutely in my opinion if handled properly again because people want it because mr kaffle odyssey and other manufacturers have a two hundred and twenty thousand customer base that they want to sell to that's what i am anticipating that we want to do but again the various ways that we can incentivize folks to equip in aopa was talking during the break period about ways that we can use the system more effectively and my question for you and mr kaffle odyssey is under the contract there's it doesn't speak directly to the fact if you want another unit in grand rapids a ground station and they don't have one what would be the process and does the contract allow for that increased coverage using the same alias and all that routine and we need it faa can you help us how would you deal with that under the contract so the contract was set up in a very flexible manner two things that that occurred this year was in some of the reauthorization language there was discussion about using airport improvement funds for airports to acquire the ground infrastructure what that does is provide the the expansion of our ground infrastructure beyond our baseline it also would accommodate possibilities of acquiring the radios that you would use on vehicles such as your fire trucks and safety vehicles and then the contract has in it what we call generic service volumes and so we'd be able to use funds from other sources to essentially purchase this capability and then we can we have multiple ways of taking the airport improvement funds and funneling it through this contract vehicle so that you can open up new service volumes so two hundred and twenty thousand customers just went almost into the infinity i mean basically in terms of users and of course for a ground vehicle you wouldn't have the same requirements in multifunction display i was giving mr petra a hard time about high definition tv i don't have one of those i don't know how to work it but somebody you know you don't need a multifunction display in your pickup truck it's on the airport but if you want it you can put it there so folks that are a sport pilots and things like that they should be able to transmit for a very inexpensive figure everybody agree with that and again mr bradley we have not forgotten that we the chairman was absolutely correct we gotta have everybody on board if the general public and that susan involved here is going to benefit to the maximum amount i don't know where the clock is going up or down i yield back mr chairman i thank the gentleman just a final question for mr scovel and i guess to maybe mr campus hutto maybe you can comment as well mr scovel in your written testimony you have a chart in here table one adsb key milestones and of course you have project completion date october two thousand and seven for the nprm issued and second is february of two thousand and eight critical design review for the ground system and then august of eight the key side initial operating capacity of broadcast at fort myers from your standpoint when should the faa when is the next major project or the next major step in the completion of adsb that the faa needs to be watching carefully and this subcommittee needs to be watching carefully to see if in fact the contract a contractor is performing as the contract calls for mr chairman i'd pick the very first item that you mentioned off the list that appears in the chart in our written testimony the notice of proposed rule making was issued a short while ago the comments to that rule are due from industry in early january those comments are should give us a pretty good indication of how industry views the longterm prospects for this program we know and faa itself has identified for us as it in its view its primary risk being user acceptance and aircraft equipage if those comments in response to the notice of proposed rulemaking come back and really hit that point hard and pounded home then we will know that adsb has a an uphill that faa has an uphill job in properly executing the contract we were confident that industry recognizes the potential but it's rather the timetable the mandate and the articulation of the user benefits longterm which really will result from adsb in we should see some of those indications in their comments to the proposed rule we in the legislation that we passed out of the house hr two thousand eight hundred and eighty one in that legislation we asked the igs office to submit an annual report to the congress concerning adsb in and i'm wondering when is the next scheduled report that you are to submit to the congress on adsb well i'll need to check with my staff sir and get back to you on that i don't have it readily available we are certainly prepared and look forward to meeting the committee's requests i thank you mr hayes if you have further questions i'd be happy to allow you more time thanks mr chairman i think it would be very instructive for those of us who remain for this video to be shown it graphically demonstrates the space and the time savings involved in adsb so if you wouldn't mind and the other thing is when i was in alaska the last time and is it dan hill in alaska vinny that's supervisor that anchorage or jim hill jim hill he took me through and met with the controllers and the supervisors and the faa it was fascinating because the test area initially is in bethel alaska if you will put a map of alaska up and your mind is a huge area in the yukon and kuskokwim delta area tremendous amount of fishing a lot of airplanes fish bonding one of the controllers brother works there in an airplane so the combination of the controller seeing it from the inside and the brother with the airplane and the difference in time with the airplane it's equipped and being able to land on a low visibility conditions was dramatic so these are real world examples and again where we're an uncontrolled airspace like mr salazar was talking about in colorado i mean it gives you a shot in the arm not a nice scar shot just a shot in the arm and i think this would be very helpful with could you run that for as many and tell us what you're showing us okay where you're looking at is basically the the airspace that's considered oceanic as you look at that that light shaded blue area that's about a hundreds a thousand square miles of what we call oceanic airspace and so as you see aircraft leaving either out of mexico what you're seeing is that's radar coverage up to the light blue area once they go into that light blue area what we do is we sanitize the airspace around the aircraft because we really don't have any surveillance capability so that that is about one hundred and twenty miles behind an aircraft and in fifty miles on either side of it so that's a fairly large volume of airspace that's considered sanitized from a safety perspective that's that's great but you know we could make better use of that airspace so as as they approach on the united states coast you'll also notice that we pick them up and radar coverage so this gives you an example of you know the capacity constrained by our separation standards as a function of you know keeping safe separation between the aircraft and then the point out there's also a whole lot of low altitude activity going on and it you know it goes pretty far out as well cause they're doing deep oil exploration so there's a lot of platforms on the base underneath this and we'd like to exploit those platforms that deploy our adsb infrastructure and again that's something we could not accomplish by with radars so we have these nice tight you know small units that can be deployed on the on the oil platforms providing services now that you can see that we can clearly put five miles separation so you've increased capacity you reduce ground delays you provide surveillance not only for the high altitude but you also providing it for the low altitude so now we can provide or extend our surveillance capabilities off shore two hundred miles out and provide the helicopter operators with surveillance so as i mentioned this was kind of a winwin situation we work closely with the helicopter associations in national to get access to those platforms in kind contributions from them are providing the transportation the electricity the telecommunications and the space and that's probably one of the most highly priced real estate in the world is getting access on those platforms so worked out to be a pretty good deal where they gave us access we were able to deploy our infrastructure or we'll be able to deploy our infrastructure it'll give us high altitude capability and low altitude capability and you can do that in other places where you don't have radar as well that's correct pacific atlantic colorado alaska absolutely very good mr ellers any other comment or question as soon as they get to down to five hundred bucks i'll be up first in line to buy one but i first have to buy the airplane to but we thank all of you for being here to testify and to answer our questions this is an issue that we will be following very closely as i know the inspector general when the faa will and we of course all have the same goal in mind and that is to get the system up and running implemented in and get the maximum use of it is early as we possibly can the faa quite frankly not only this administration but previous administrations they do not have the best track record in following through on contracts and monitoring them we hope that that will not be the case with itt and with the adsb and it will be the responsibility of the faa to monitor it to make sure that itt is performing it will be our responsibility in this sub committee to provide aggressive oversight to make certain that the contract is being followed and implemented as it is spelled out and to make certain that the faa is providing the right oversight as well so with that again we thank the witnesses and the subcommittee stance adjourn