As a result, the FAA tends to focus on pleasing its various political overseers rather than its aviation customers, who are directly concerned with the quality, effectiveness and cost of ATC.

Given the FAA’s long history of problems, it must contend with oversight from the GAO, the Inspector General, a number of congressional committees, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Department of Transportation, all of which divert considerable management attention.

For similar reasons, the FAA has lost program management expertise, making it overly reliant on contractors it has difficulty controlling.

Over the years, the FAA has experienced a brain drain, losing the best and the brightest engineers to the private sector, which provides better compensation and a more challenging work culture.

The FAA is both the ATC service provider and the aviation safety regulator, and its self-identity as a safety agency has led to an over-cautious culture that is unlike that of aerospace companies, which are regulated for safety at arm’s length by the FAA.

This report identifies five institutional factors that account for the FAA’s status-quo bias: The agency is particularly resistant to high-potential innovations that would disrupt its own institutional status quo-such as performance-based navigation, real-time weather and remote towers. And the FAA does a poor job of procuring new technology, with many programs eventually cancelled or emerging years late at inflated cost. When the agency does embrace something new, it has a hard time defining its requirements and often delegates this task to contractors-who come up with many add-on functions that increase cost and make implementation more complex. The FAA is slow to embrace promising innovations that originate in outside research organizations or private-sector companies. Several important lessons emerge from these studies.

remote airport towers employing digital imaging, and.

GPS aircraft surveillance as a replacement for ground radar (for most purposes).

GPS-based landing as a replacement for legacy instrument landing systems.digital communications between pilots and controllers.This report uses case studies of seven critical elements of NextGen to examine the problems encountered in the U.S. Unfortunately, progress toward implementing advanced ATM in the United States (where the system is called “NextGen”) has been far slower than anticipated. New technologies and procedures would also increase the effective capacity of airport runways, improve landing protocols, transform staffed ATC facilities on the ground, and provide pilots with more accurate and timely information on weather and other variables. Over the past two decades, aviation experts have developed a new air traffic paradigm-often called air traffic management, or ATM, to emphasize its use of much richer information than a single locus of “control.” Under this framework, technologies such as digital communications and GPS could facilitate automating much of the routine separation of aircraft, permitting far greater use of the entire airspace than the limited “airways” defined by ground-based navigation aids. Our ability to provide a vastly improved system is not in question. system has fallen well behind the capacity of new technologies to provide safer, faster, more reliable and more fuel-efficient air travel and to keep pace with the increasing volume of air traffic.

But the basic features and procedures of the 1960s ATC system have remained remarkably unchanged through a half century of dramatic advances in technology and management in many other realms. Many new technologies, such as powerful computers in ATC facilities and collision avoidance systems in aircraft, have made air travel progressively safer and more reliable.

Air traffic organization