Make no mistake, the effort to catapult air traffic control technology to a revolutionary and vastly more capable level in the United States and Europe is a very, very big deal, not only in terms of scope and cost but also in terms of the consequences of success or failure.
There is a staggering amount of work yet to be done, but in the United States there also has been an impressive amount of work completed, and the rate of implementation is accelerating. Clearly, the pressure is on to make the two systems, NextGen in the United States and Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR) in Europe, highly harmonized, not perfect clones, but close enough to not get in the way.
A possibly overly simplistic explanation of the difference between the two automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) modes that are the heart of this advance is this: ADS-B Out is the airplane signaling its global positioning system-derived position for the air traffic service provider to process as if it were…
