It may be cold in Minneapolis, but it was glowing last night at the “Polynesian Escape” themed suite hosted by HEICO Repair Group. I shuffled in past the cut-out Tiki torches to a platter heaped high with Florida stone crab claws, mussels, oysters and shrimp. But it was the barbecued pulled-pork that kept me coming back. In the adjoining room, they were serving Mai-Tais in plastic coconuts.

Then it was on to the Gables Engineering suite for a St. Paul-brewed Summit beer served in a keepsake Gables glass. There I was greeted by Rick Finale, Gables vice president of engineering and business development, and entertained by the Gables employee jazz band. I figured these guys are good enough to have a stage name. They said they do — “Gables Engineering.”

Enjoying the ambiance in one corner of the room was Stylian Cocalides, vice president of Miami-based Avionica, and in through the door walked Armand Wong and Hugo Fortes of Miami-based Avionics Support Group. Gables is based in Coral Gables, Florida. Is there a theme here?

More than 30 companies hosted suites at this year’s AMC, AEEC annual meetings. I regret that I did not have the time to visit each and every suite. Doing so, however, would have compromised the dispatch reliability of this daily blog.

Earlier in the day, I served as moderator of the AEEC symposium. This annual panel, spearheaded by Roy Oishi of ARINC Industry Activities, surveys the latest developments in commercial aviation. This year’s symposium, “The Evolution of Legacy Aircraft Into NextGen/SESAR Capability,” focused on retrofitting aircraft for the NextGen regime and runway incursion prevention.

Similar to the enlightening perspective of the Delta-Northwest merger given by Delta COO Stephen Gorman in the keynote address Monday, Blair Reeves, Southwest Airlines manager of flight operations engineering, gave a candid assessment of that airline’s fleetwide adoption of Required Navigation Performance (RNP) equipment and procedures. Last June, Southwest said it will invest $175 million over six years to implement RNP.

You might think the project is relatively straightforward, given that Southwest operates only one aircraft type. But that fleet is a mix of 329 737-700 Next-Generation (NG) series aircraft and 210 older 737-300/500 Classics.

“We still don’t have GPS on our older jets. We still don’t have a second FMC, we don’t have a second CDU sitting there for the pilot inputs,” Reeves related. “We need to make the crew able to deal with all of these situations, with all of this new technology, as easy as possible. These guys on the -300s and -500s are doing ACARS on a single CDU and doing FMC work on the other side. That’s kind of an archaic way of doing it but it’s way we’ve been doing it — it worked at the time.”

When the fuel and emissions savings of the tighter RNP approaches became evident, the airline’s accountants took notice. The way was paved for the ambitious fleet retrofit.

“Right off the bat, we need dual redundancy or triple redundancy in GPS; ours is dual,” Reeves said. “We want to make sure we improve the dispatch ability and overall availability of the navigation systems. We move those over on the standby bus; that brings in some more problems. As you can imagine, 737-300s and -500s are old. They were based on an electric system that has long since had 87 different items added to it to stress it out. … That’s one of the things we’re having to deal with. When you try to move all of these things onto the standby bus to improve your availability and dispatchability, you find out really quickly that we may have to make some upgrades in that, too. That sends the dollar figure skyrocketing through the roof.”

Southwest’s RNP modifications are divided into two veins — one for the NGs and one for the Classics. The Classics, in turn, are undergoing a two-phase retrofit. Phase 1 will involve the installation of a CDU, dual flight management computers and GPS receiver. Phase 2 will see the installation of new cockpit displays. The display retrofit on the 737-300s will be the first application of GE Aviation’s SDS-6000 large area display suite.

“From a systems level, the integration task has been a lot more interesting,” Reeve said. “As soon as you open up an old jet, you find out pretty quickly that companies don’t have the expertise they used to have on the older equipment. They have lost a lot of their brain trust. … When you go into electric load analysis; when you go into environmental cooling of a jet that’s been sitting out there operating for 20 years, you find out pretty quickly where some holes are, and we’ve seen just about every bit of that.”

Reeves said the airline has worked with four or five vendors, including Boeing as a manufacturer and as a systems integrator. “They’ve tackled this task, sometimes with hiccups, but other times with absolute stunning success, and we’re getting through that,” he said.

Also speaking at the symposium was Stephen J. Vail, senior manager of Air Traffic Operations with FedEx Express. Vail serves on the recently minted RTCA NextGen Task Force, which has been tasked with recommending “a prioritized set of (NextGen) operational capabilities with a positive business case to be delivered by 2018.” Those recommendations are expected by August.

“I’m here as a paid political announcement for a NextGen task force seeking your help,” Vail said. “This is the first meeting of this type that I’ve ever been to as an operator and I don’t recognize many faces around the room, so you haven’t been to operational meetings. If we don’t increase that interface I believe that the road to NextGen will be a rocky path.”

I can attest to the expectations weighing against Vail’s group after watching a recent House Aviation Subcommittee hearing on FAA reauthorization. The task force was mentioned more than once as a near-term panacea of sorts for the substantial operational and equipment challenges of NextGen. “We have sort of a scary deadline — 2009 in August we have to have this plan,” Vail said.

This represents the final blog posting from your correspondent at the joint AMC, AEEC annual meetings in Minneapolis. It’s been real, it’s been fun — there just hasn’t been much sun (until today). That shouldn’t be a problem at the 2010 joint meetings, scheduled March 29 to April 1 at the Hyatt Regency Phoenix.