Air Traffic Control

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) lacks a complete systems architecture, or overall blueprint, to guide its development of interrelated systems comprising the air traffic control system. The lack of such an architecture allows incompatibilities to persist among air traffic control systems, which in turn result in higher-than-necessary development, integration, and maintenance costs. Because of the size, complexity, and importance of FAA's air traffic control modernization effort, GAO reviewed it to determine (1) whether FAA has a target architecture(s) and associated subarchitectures to guide the development of its air traffic control systems and (2) what, if any, architectural incompatibilities exist among air traffic control systems.

GAO found that: (1) FAA lacks a complete systems architecture, or overall blueprint, to guide and constrain the development and maintenance of the many interrelated systems comprising its ATC infrastructure; (2) FAA is developing one of the two principal components of a complete systems architecture, the "logical" description of FAA's current and future concept of ATC operations as well as descriptions of the ATC business functions to be performed, the associated systems to be used, and the information flows among systems; (3) however, FAA is not developing, nor does it have plans to develop, the second essential component, the ATC-wide "technical" description which defines all required information technology and telecommunications standards and critical ATC systems' technical characteristics; (4) the lack of a complete and enforced systems architecture has permitted incompatibilities among existing ATC systems and will continue to do so for future systems; (5) overcoming these incompatibilities means "higher than need be" system development, integration, and maintenance costs, and reduced overall systems performance; (6) because there are no standards for programming languages or open systems, ATC systems' software has been written in many different application programming languages, often exhibiting proprietary system characteristics; (7) this not only increases software maintenance costs but also effectively precludes sharing software components among systems; (8) without a technical architecture specifying the information technology standards and rules, the opportunity to share software will likely be lost; (9) in some cases, system incompatibilities exist because the technology and standards now available to permit system integration and interoperability did not exist or were only emerging when the systems were designed and developed; (10) other system incompatibilities are the result of FAA's failure to adopt and effectively enforce a technical architecture; (11) by failing to formulate a complete systems architecture, FAA permits and perpetuates inconsistency and incompatibility; (12) as a result, future ATC system development and maintenance will continue to be more difficult and costly than it need be and system performance will continue to be suboptimal; (13) FAA's management structure for developing, maintaining, and enforcing an ATC systems architecture is not effective; and (14) instead, processes now in place permit the acquisition of architecturally non-compliant systems without special waiver of architectural standards.

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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