As the deadline for equipping for the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) nears, GA pilots are scrambling to find out everything they need to know. What is certain is that by Jan. 1, 2020, aircraft operating in most US controlled airspace must be equipped with Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) Out avionics.
The folks at Wipaire want to help. They’ve put a lot of good information on the company’s website, including:
Does the ADS-B Mandate Affect Me?
You can learn more about this and other NextGEN programs and how they affect general aviation at FAA,gov/NextGen/GA.
ManyDecadesGA, I don’t know who you are but I wish I could have a beer with you. As I continue to read your comments I am starting to grasp the basics of this system and its technology.
As you often point out, this is a boondoggle. Some faction at the FAA decided that applying the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” rule would not result in the need for increased staff and budget as well as lucrative R&D and production work for the electronic toy manufacturers. Instead, a crisis is invented, 100s of thousands of hours of staff and outside consultant work are invested, billions of tax dollars are required, and no one in Congress has the expertise to call BS on the whole thing.
As for low end GA, apparently no one with any clout in D.C. gives a flying f**k about us. It’s all about military training airspace (so distressing when a 152 gets in the way of a tactical jet doing 450 kts) and Jeff Bezos wanting to deliver stuff to your window by UAS.
I quit flying about a year ago. Have a perfectly airworthy E-AB parked in a hangar I own, but am just sick of the steady drum beat of (effectively) anti-GA policies from the FAA, DOT, HS and so on.
Someone please cheer me up!
I have one my E-AB aircraft equipped and 2020 legal. But it’s much less expensive to do so for an E-AB aircraft. I wouldn’t consider it if I still had a certificated aircraft.
Does ADS-B work? Yes. Does it work well? No. There are a number of problems with it, mostly based in the lack of ADS-B coverage. Being a ground based system, ADS-B is designed to accommodate the high flying IFR crowd and the airlines. GA gets forced to buy grossly overprices units, pay outrageous costs for installation in certificated aircraft, then gets lousy coverage when in the vicinity of an airport away from major metropolitan centers. Yeah, when you need the traffic coverage the most is when it works the worst. Is it a good value for GA? No. But that is completely unnecessary and should have been addressed in the Part 23 rewrite, which, much like the third class medical reform, the FAA is ignoring and refusing to fix. The part 23 rewrite is closing in on 2 years past the deadline to be completed.(web search “faa part 23 rewrite” for more info.)
Mode C traffic gets picked up by radar, data transferred to the ADS-B tower, then rebroadcast back out IF they are within 15 miles of an aircraft transmitting ADS-B out. That scheme is lousy, and potentially deadly as the FAA withholds traffic information from pilots to try to entice them to comply with a rule they may not necessarily need to comply with. Additionally, the FAA’s radar and/or data transfer to ADS-B is lousy, so Mode C traffic will occasionally pop up on the screen, then disappears again. The reliability of Mode C traffic being shown by an ADS-B unit is really poor.
Several vendors are only selling single band (978 UAT In) ADS-B units rather than dual band units. In that case, Mode S traffic isn’t received directly from other aircraft transmitting Mode S. Instead, it has to picked up by the ADS-B station and rebroadcast if the traffic is within 15 miles of a plane transmitting either 1090-ES or UAT Out. Again, too many places to fail thanks to the lack of ground stations in the mountainous west and other remote areas. For best reliability, only buy a dual band receiver. (978 UAT IN and 1090-ES IN). Lots of E-AB aircraft are equipping with the Dynon Skyview system using a Trig Mode S transponder. But Dynon only sells a single band receiver, so those equipping with this equipment can’t see another identically equipped aircraft unless they can both see an ADS-B tower to retransmit the data. Other units, such as the Skyguard, will see the the Dynon Mode S transmitters directly without needing an ADS-B tower rebroadcast. But even a dual band receiver doesn’t fix the Mode-C traffic issues. And let’s not forget there will always be the non-electric aircraft flying legally with no transponder and no ADS-B out. The Mark 1 eyeballs will always be your number one tool to deconflict with traffic.
Can these problems be fixed? That’s the big question. The answer is, not 100%. But it can be improved. There is no reason for the FAA to withhold traffic information from pilots simply because they are not equipped with ADS-B out. That rates as manslaughter on the FAAs part when they allow pilots to die by intentionally withholding traffic information.
Additional ADS-B towers out west would improve the performance, but that makes for more cost overruns on an already overpriced system. As a consumer that may buy (or be forced to buy) and an ADS-B unit, know what you are buying and be sure to buy a dual band unit that will provide as much data as possible without bouncing through an ADS-B tower. (Common theme here is that the data breakdowns happen with the FAAs part of rebroadcasting the data).
If one takes the mindset that this system is designed for the airlines serving large metropolitan areas and high altitude IFR traffic, then it can be a 100% success. If one has the idea that it’s gong to serve low altitude bug smashers that frequent small towns and small airports away from metropolitan centers, then it’s going to be a miserable failure.
FAA’s ADS-B doesn’t come anywhere near addressing airline long term economic or efficient ATS requirements either. A primarily “S” based ATS system (of the C-N-S triad) that FAA plans for NextGen, using 1930’s separation concepts, fails miserably, at capacity, cost, and efficiency targets. Further, FAA’s ADS-B system will never be global, and thus Nextgen is heading straight for a miserable long term $40B global failure. FAA’s ADS-B fails for both airlines as well as GA, and is a disaster for military and UAVs. It has to change, and anyone (airline or GA) who invests in FAA’s present seriously flawed version of ADS-B is simply wasting money at this point.
Well it is like this. I am going to be 60 next year and I have two medicals before this mess starts. If I get through the 2017 third class and then the 2019 third class, then maybe, just maybe I will equip my old Cherokee with ADS B out. There is no panic in my decision, just common sense. I guess if I were 40 or even 50 I may just go ahead and do it. Then again, if they pass the third class medical reform bill, which does not look too promising at this point, I would consider doing it tomorrow…
That works as a strategy if one has lots of cash to spend (or tax write-off), and there may be some short term benefit to seeing some additional ADS reporting traffic, but in the long run it is mostly just a waste of money. That’s because eventually FAA is going to have to alter the NextGen avionics criteria significantly, for NextGen to ever work (it’s presently heading toward a massive $40B failure), and the present equipage will be largely obsolete and lack needed capabilities, while being both dysfunctional and outrageously expensive. So installing ADS-B now, per the FAA spec (e.g., DO-260B/FAR 91.227), is just putting good money to waste at this point (as the airlines clearly already see).
Contrary to the assertion in the article above, it is far from certain that any 2020 deadline for ADS-B equipage will be sustained. For starters, it is very likely that the airlines will get long extensions to at least 2026, since there is no hope whatsoever they will meet the ADS-B rule by 2020. Further, the problems with FAA’s seriously flawed ADS-B make it unlikely that it will EVER be required in its current form. It is vastly too expensive for low end GA, it WON’T ever WORK to solve Nextgen’s issues, international operators and ANSPs are already thumbing their noses at FAA for trying to cram a poorly conceived standard down global aviation’s throat, and worst of all not all air vehicles can see each other without fatally flawed UAT and poorly airspace covered and ADS-R. Already there is talk of another FAA boondoggle for a TABS (draft TSO C199), that also won’t work and is overbuilt (overspecified NIC and NAC), and still needing obsolete worthless WAAS. Finally, there are a host of more problems now arising with FAA’s fouled up version of ADS-B that don’t exist in other countries that are doing ADS in much more sensible and less expensive way (not even considering the serious vulnerability and security issues noted with FAA’s conceptually flawed version). So don’t hold your breath for GA ADS-B equipping by 2020. It is far more likely that the FAA ADS-B rule will simply be revised requiring yet different capability, or be suspended, or be completely rescinded, well before 2020, if not even starting by this fall, in the FAA re-authorization hearings, when FAA is going to face the wrath of nearly the entire airspace user community.