IBM Federal sees no profit on AAS

Electronic News, March 15, 1993 by Jack Robertson

WASHINGTON--IBM is not making any profit on the 3-year late and cost-overrun Advanced Automation System (AAS) air traffic control program, Gerald Ebker, chairman of IBM Federal Systems, told Congress last week.

Mr. Ebker said at a hearing of the House Public Works and Transportation Aviation subcommittee he "has relinquished his duties as CEO (of the IBM division) to assume full management of the AAS program." Both the IBM executive and Acting FAA Administrator Joseph Del Bazzo claimed the latest ASS contract fixes "have solved not only the problems, but the causes of the problems" and the first AAS operating system will be ready in Seattle in October, 1996.

Both officials parried questions on extra costs caused by the latest AAS program slippage. The General Accounting Office estimated the new delays will hike AAS program costs by another $235 million. IBM is slated to submit a revised AAS cost to the FAA by April 15, and the two parties will begin talks to amend the contract. The original AAS plan may be scaled back, but it isn't clear how a smaller AAS scope will be reflected in a new adjusted price.

Originally the FAA planned to consolidate en route and airport terminal traffic control into 23 large centers across the country. Acting Administrator Del Bazzo told the legislators last week the FAA is considering several options such as continuing with 22 en route centers and separate airport terminal centers or consolidating terminal centers into 53 regional complexes. Sources said one likely choice is consolidating nine of 10 most congested metropolitan areas into super-control centers, and leaving and upgrading 170 existing stand-alone terminals in their present sites.

IBM is expected to press to keep the airport terminal centers within AAS. However, Allen Li, GAO associate director on transportation issues, testified the continuing AAS delays are forcing the FAA to keep aging and often obsolete terminal systems in operation, with no early replacement seen.

Mr. Li said the terminal control systems could be split from the AAS program, while continuing the present AAS en route computerized control. The FAA is also considering a separate replacement of controller radar displays in airport towers--now part of the delayed AAS program.

IBM's RS6000 RISC workstation, for AAS was attacked by air traffic controllers as more complex and difficult to use than present control stations. Rep. James Oberstar (D., Minn.), subcommittee chairman, cited complaints that the IBM console detracts attention from screens because controllers need to make 16 keyboard entries to identify aircraft on displays and project flight paths; only a single function for this is now needed.

John Thornton, senior director of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, said far from increasing productivity, the IBM console was more labor intensive and potentially dangerous. Mr. Ebker said, "We had some of our best human factors engineers on this program."

Rep. Normal Mineta (D., Calif.) and chairman of the parent Public Works and Transportation Committee, and Mr. Del Bazzo debated the merits of the distributive processing network approach adopted for AAS. The Congressmen said he was concerned the vast distributive networks often were too difficult to implement--while the FAA official argued this provided an open architecture allowing new functions to be added easily to the overall system.

The FAA was criticized by subcommittee members and GAO for making the original AAS too grandiose. The original plan to combine en route and terminal control would have required each of the 23 consolidated centers to have 210 interconnected consoles operating at peak load. "IBM so far has only been able to reach a level in which 56 common consoles work together for any significant length of time," GAO said.

A smaller initial test will be conducted running 28 consoles together for six hours, Mr. Del Bazzo said. Sources noted the AAS networking problem may be relieved somewhat if the FAA abandons its total center consolidation plan, because a lesser number of consoles will be needed for a scaled-down distributive network.