National Airspace System

Comprehensive FAA Plan for Global Positioning System Is Needed Gao ID: RCED-95-26 May 10, 1995

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is enhancing the Defense Department's Global Positioning System. When fully integrated as a navigation aid in the air traffic control system, this satellite-based system will be superior to the ground-based navigation aid now used, enabling civil aircraft to fly more fuel-efficient routes. Government and industry groups recommended that FAA accelerate some of the milestones for introducing the enhancements to enable civil aviation to fully use the system as soon as possible. FAA modified its schedule for using the Global Positioning System by accelerating several milestones from 2000 to 1997. This report determines whether FAA will have enough time under the new milestones to augment the Global Positioning System and whether the agency has taken appropriate measures to better manage its Global Positioning System efforts.

GAO found that: (1) although FAA has met all of its milestones to date, its future milestones involve more complex and difficult tasks; (2) FAA may not have enough time to develop and implement its wide area system augmentation by 1997, although civil aircraft are expected to use the augmented GPS without relying on other navigation aids for backup; (3) FAA estimates that system software development alone may take 24 to 28 months; (4) implementation of the wide area system may be delayed by factors beyond FAA control, such as the launching of commercial satellites needed to support the system; (5) in 1994, FAA strengthened its GPS management by integrating its GPS activities, securing the necessary funding to accelerate the wide area system's development, and issuing plans for developing and implementing augmentation systems and transitioning to GPS; and (6) the FAA GPS plans are not comprehensive, since they omit a schedule for implementing the local area system, cost estimates for the local and wide area systems, and the probabilities of meeting schedule and cost estimates.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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