AMASS AND ASDE-X
An FAA Shell Game That Denies Many Airports An Effective Runway Safety Tool

THE EQUIPMENT

• The Airport Movement Area Safety System (AMASS) provides controllers with audio and visual alerts to potential collisions on the runway. It processes radar data to predict aircraft movement for arriving and departing aircraft and detects aircraft and vehicles that infringe on the runway surfaces. However, AMASS is disabled during periods of precipitation because it can mistake rain for aircraft, which results in false alerts. As a result of this deficiency, AMASS was not in use at the time of a serious runway incident at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport on July 6, 2005 in which a passenger jet and a cargo jet came close to colliding in dark, rainy conditions.
• Airport Surface Detection Equipment, Model X (ASDE-X) provides controllers with an all-weather, surface surveillance system that uses both radar and multilateration, which is the process of determining an aircraft’s location on the airport surface through the use of the aircraft’s transponder. Additionally, ASDE-X has an, as yet, undeveloped capability to provide an alert to both controllers and pilots of an impending runway incident. This would satisfy the National Transportation Safety Board’s recommendation to provide direct safety alerts to pilots.

FAA FLIP-FLOPS ON DECISIONS TO DEPLOY ASDE-X

• The FAA’s announced original plan for deployment of ASDE-X included 34 airports. But to date, the system is fully operational at only four airports: Houston-Hobby, Milwaukee, Orlando, Providence. Initial testing of ASDE-3X will soon begin at Charlotte.
• On Nov. 2, 2005, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association held press conferences in Detroit, Houston Intercontinental, Memphis, Minneapolis, New York, Salt Lake City and Washington-National – all airports which use the AMASS system that does not work in bad weather – to call on the FAA to immediately install ASDE-X at those and all the other busy airports that were originally scheduled to receive the equipment but which now have been pushed back indefinitely on the deployment list.
• Just hours after NATCA’s press conferences, the FAA answered NATCA’s call and announced it would deploy ASDE-X at 14 airports: Baltimore, Boston, Chicago Midway, Chicago O’Hare, Detroit, Houston Intercontinental, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York-JFK, New York-LaGuardia, Newark, Seattle-Tacoma, Washington Dulles and Washington National.
• Added together, that would be 20 total locations for ASDE-X deployment by 2011, just over half the original FAA plan.
• NATCA believes the FAA announcement was a step in the right direction and long overdue. However, the agency’s foot-dragging on safety decisions and its painfully drawn out process of actually installing the equipment lead NATCA to fear that the process could drag well into the next decade, while leaving many busy airports without any surface safety equipment what-so-ever, thus putting the FAA in direct conflict with one of the NTSB’s biggest safety concerns, an airport surface safety alerting system in place at all commercial US airports.
• The FAA’s announcement also comes with a caveat that deeply troubles NATCA, the deployment of ASDE-X at the aforementioned 14 airports will come at the expense of 15 airports that were originally scheduled to receive ASDE-X and which currently have no surface surveillance system: Albuquerque, Austin, Burbank, Colorado Springs, Columbus, Indianapolis, Oakland, Ontario, Calif., Raleigh-Durham, Reno, Sacramento, San Antonio, San Jose, San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Tampa are no longer scheduled to receive ASDE-X. This is not an acceptable way for the FAA to enhance surface safety at our nation’s airports.