Air Traffic Control

FAA Needs to Justify Further Investment in Its Oceanic Display System Gao ID: IMTEC-92-80 September 30, 1992

The Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) manually intensive process for controlling aircraft over U.S. oceanic airspace cannot keep pace with growing traffic volumes. As a first step in addressing this situation, FAA is acquiring the Oceanic Display and Planning System, which will give air traffic controllers a computer-generated display of oceanic air traffic and an automatic update and display of flight plans. The system, however, has a long history of problems, and more deficiencies continue to surface. Despite a $49-million investment over 11 years, the system is still missing a key element--an operation conflict probe that can determine the impact of flight changes on aircraft separation. Delivering this crucial function will require extensive time and effort because the current software does not meet certain requirements and is poorly written. Further, FAA is not performing basic capacity management activities on the system, which increases the risk of shortfalls in processing air traffic. Although FAA claims that it will cost only about $1.5 million more to complete the system, this estimate is highly suspect because it is not based on any formal estimating tools or techniques and does not include the money to correct known conflict probe problems. Further, FAA has no idea when the system will finally be completed. At this point, continued development of the system is not justified, and FAA may be wasting time and money by doing so.

GAO found that: (1) verification and validation findings show deficiencies, including failure to meet the specified requirement for ensuring minimum separation of aircraft, lack of design documentation, inconsistencies between the conflict probe software and air traffic control operational standards, and poor coding practices; (2) FAA is not performing basic capacity monitoring and planning activities for ODAPS; (3) FAA does not know when ODAPS will be completed; (4) the cost estimate is not based on formal estimating models; (5) FAA assessment of ODAPS fell short of a credible analysis of alternatives; and (6) the FAA assessment did not include data on the relative life-cycle cost and schedule implications of the alternatives it did consider.

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