According to this summary of a GAO report (links to the full PDF on gao.gov), “Development of the GPS-enhancing Wide Area Augmentation System took six years longer and cost $1.5 billion more than it should have, the GAO said, largely due to ineffective coordination among various offices of the FAA that were working on the program”.
9 thoughts on “Our government at work”
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I guess we’re supposed to be horrified that big gumint wasted 1.5 billion dollars enhancing the GPS system. But private industry has been known to blow comparable amounts of money developing things as simple as a fancy safety razor.
The lack of availability of the safety razor hasn’t cost anyone’s life. By contrast, a 6-year delay in WAAS means that there was also a 6-year delay in new precision approaches to smaller airports (where the instruments in the plane give the pilot both vertical and horizontal guidance and in fact most of the approach can be flown by the autopilot in most planes). Senator Wellstone, for example, died during a non-precision approach that probably would have been superseded by a safer easier precision WAAS approach.
Wow, the government is inefficient. Somebody alert the press.
Meanwhile why didn’t you just use one of the many privately funded, much more efficient geospatial positioning services available courtesy of the free market.
I’m sure if big gumint hadn’t gotten involved, Burt Rutan and Paul Allen would be launching their own GPS satellites right about 20 years from now.
Here’s another shocker:
aviation is dangerous!
Was the cause of death lack of a precision
approach, or pilot error (in judgement)?
“The weather in the Eveleth area was so bad hours after the crash that a 12-person National Transportation Safety Board team was to fly from Washington into Duluth instead of Eveleth”
They could have just gone to another airport,
assuming they planned for that contigency.
But that’s not my real point; Yes
govt screws up a lot, is inefficient, etc.
But if the big cost of this example is not having precision approaches to small airports,
who cares?
It benefits whom? Rich guys who can afford
to dick-around with aviation. Or pilots
too stupid to pay attention to Wx mins.
I’m no expert on this, but that has never stopped me before…
I remember seeing news stories years ago that the us air traffic control infrastructure was terribly out of date. Also, I just recently read this story:
http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?NewsID=2275
something about a windows server requiring rebooting and leaving 800 planes in the air when it failed…
Okay it would seem that the faa isn’t really keeping up to snuff…
So WHO’S TO BLAME!!!
If you’ll pardon me for saying this I believe that the folks that use the system should provide funding for the system, however I am willing to assume that the BIG users (commercial airlines) are not stepping up with armloads of cash. In fact all that I see in this arena are banckrupties and begging for bailouts.
I would rather see a system that leverages the large blocks of users in metro areas (regional airports) to support the isolated, and relatively impoverished, users in rural (or non-regional) areas… Something like the funding of rural telecom through fees on metro areas telecom users.
Of course this sort of socialist funding model would never, um, fly in the current political environment of well-heeled power brokers and corporate welfare.
Just my two bits…
Fabio: The thing is, when private industry wants to blow money on something, it can’t send you to jail for not funding it. The government can and does jail people for not paying taxes.
Fabio asks “why didn’t you just use one of the many privately funded, much more efficient geospatial positioning services ”
For one thing it isn’t legal to fly airplanes in the clouds and approach airports except via published FAA procedures.
The Wellstone crash was pilot error? That seems pretty obvious and it is also true of most accidents. That’s not a good reason for accepting a 6-year delay for a safety improvement. Instead of hoping for human perfection to arrive (and betting our lives on it) it might be better to engineer things, such as more precision approaches, that reduce our need to have superhuman humans piloting airplanes.
Excellent point on the 6-year delay, Philip. And we should demand better than that from our government.
That said, private industry is not one bit less wasteful or less poorly managed. Anyone who tells you it is hasn’t spent a lifetime in it, like I have. People are everywhere, and they screw things up everywhere.
And don’t let anybody tell you that we don’t have to pay for the mistakes of private industry. Of course we do, right over the counter.
Realizing weather is below mins, and proceeding
to backup does not constitute superhuman effort, it constitutes common sense.
And we’re still talking about putting precision
approaches in shitty little podunk airports.
In fact the more I think about this, the more
thankful I am for the delay. Lower
approach mins means guys with 200 hrs, and
not much of a clue, can push the envelope
more. Which means the risk of someone flying
into my house would increase.