Air Traffic Control

Justifications for Capital Investments Need Strengthening Gao ID: RCED-93-55 January 14, 1993

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) launched a major effort in 1991--now called the Capital Investment Plan--to modernize air traffic control by acquiring new radar, communications, and data processing systems designed to bolster the safety and efficiency of air travel. While acquiring these new systems, FAA has encountered serious problems in cost growth and peformance as well as schedule delays. In an earlier report (GAO/RCED-91-159), GAO found that FAA's failure to prepare mission need statements for any of its major acquisitions had contributed to these acquisition problems. FAA reformed its acquisition process in 1991 by requiring a mission need statement for all new system acquisitions in the Capital Investment Plan. This report discusses whether (1) mission need statements contained evidence to support the need for new investments and (2) the statements relied on analyses of current performance of air traffic control systems.

GAO found that FAA: (1) improved and increased its use of mission need statements, but it did not factually support 81 percent of its needs in the statements examined; (2) did not use the extensive data resources available to document its needs and incorporated few system users' views on system performance; (3) did not measure or analyze in most statements its current operations' performance to determine its needs, target improvements, and set priorities; (4) took the unnecessary risks of not choosing the most appropriate and cost-effective solutions to its problems, and not knowing if its needs had changed; (5) acquisition orders and instructions did not stress the importance of conducting mission analyses; (6) found it difficult to locate and collect appropriate data to support its mission need statements; and (7) had little incentive to document its mission need statements, since it included many of the unsupported acquisitions in its budget request.

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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