FAA can't measure how NextGen will perform

The Federal Aviation Administration's NextGen is a $40 billion effort to fundamentally transform air traffic control within the United States, but the agency doesn't know how to measure its performance against real-world aviation goals.

A Government Accountability Office report dated July 27 finds that the agency has hired outside consultants from Mitre Corp. to help come up with metrics to measure how well NextGen will improve areas such as the capacity and safety of the U.S. national airspace system.

NextGen is a series of projects that collectively should replace today's radar air traffic control system with a satellite-based system capable of automation and of handling up to three times more air traffic than is currently possible. A June 2010 Transportation Department inspector general report charged that current FAA management of NextGen "ultimately puts billions of taxpayer dollars at risk."

The FAA acknowledges that it should come up with ways of measuring how NextGen technology does once implemented. In fact, one of the first tasks a combined metrics committee of Mitre and FAA staff will undertake, FAA officials told the GAO, will be "to review an extensive list of several hundred potential metrics that FAA has considered in the past."

Admittedly, choosing metrics can be difficult, since some aspects of performance are outside of the FAA's control. Airlines must train their crews to use procedures and equip aircraft with equipment capable of taking advantage of NextGen advances.

However, when it comes to FAA measuring the performance of its progress in implanting NextGen technologies, no such barriers exist. And while the FAA does track the performance of individual NextGen projects--though GAO casts doubt on the validity of some of FAA's Earned Value Management reports--it has no way of measuring the full picture of NextGen efforts. The impact of a slippage by one project, for example, can't be tracked through the agency's current acquisition management system, which is not designed for managing integrated projects, the report states.  

The FAA is setting up a portfolio management tool, though none of the projects loaded into it so far are linked to specific NextGen operational improvements, and the data loading has been a slowed by lack of personnel, according to the GAO.

For more:
- download the report, GAO-10-629 (.pdf)

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