Ever since I started to fly it has been confusing to me that the FAA does not spend a few $million publishing charts, airport and airspace information, and terrain avoidance information for the U.S. on a Web site; this would greatly improve the availability of this information to pilots and therefore safety. A federal report released today provides some insight. This report looks at 20 computer- and software-heavy projects undertaken by the FAA over the last 7 years. They found cost overruns of $4.3 billion and schedule slippage of up to 7 years (but never less than 1 year).
It is no wonder that a lot of decision-makers don’t want to invest in anything with an information technology component.
I’ve been thinking about starting a website to distribute the VFR sectionals, IFR charts and whatever other publications I could get my hands on. Most of this stuff is public domain and some of it is in digital format. Other stuff can be digitized fairly easily.
My intention is that it should be free – too much in aviation is expensive already. And there’s a couple of companies that sell this stuff digitally already.
So I was thinking of getting some webspace, setting up bittorrent links to save on bandwidth, and asking for donations.
I wonder if this is a bad idea… Personally, I think it’s the FAA’s job to do this. And there is always the spectre of liability.
Comments?
Rudy, great idea. But watch the government making it a cute x $bln project with hundreds of contractors working 75 hours per week and trying to build this web service using high end enterprise servers worth multi mln in hardware and software… when a few linux servers with a network sprayer and a big pipe would suffice.
The government needs to simply avoid doing the software, period. They can’t seem to run a project properly. That being said, there’s a world of difference between building air traffic _control_ software, and software that simply serves up a library of current information.
The FAA should simply _contract_ with an existing service, like AeroPlanner, and _certify_ the results that you get with it. They could then devote their dollars to ensuring that AeroPlanner is correct, instead of dollars to replicated development.
Yes, I am a happy AeroPlanner user. Best $13 a month I’ve spent in a long time.