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.

And the winner is … Al Franken. Sorry, living in Washington as I do you get caught up in the minutiae of politics, local and otherwise. Suffice to say this great state hosting us this week will soon have its full complement of two U.S. senators.

After a slow start Monday, the AMC Open Forum picked up steam yesterday, adjourning after Item 93 of the 241 listed. That item, submitted by Air Canada Jazz, concerned quality control issues with rolls of paper used in the airline’s ACARS printer. “We are getting many rolls that do not fit into the printer,” Jazz said. “Examining the problem rolls showed that the dimensions of the plastic tips on the end of the rolls are incorrect.” Supplier Miltope responded that it has already instituted a quality-control effort, including “evaluating the feasibility of a strong, more resilient shipping box to the customer” and “strong plastic for the spindle insert.”

Another airline antagonism nipped in the bud. “So we can identify one more (AMC) success story — Number 5 on my watch,” said the triumphant moderator, Marijan Jozic of KLM.

The open forum was followed by the second of three AMC symposium presentations, this one on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. Daryl Remily of Boeing and Michael Scheferhoff of Lufthansa Technik reported progress in migrating RFID into the aerospace industry, where the smart tags can have widespread utility for identifying and handling parts. A regulatory framework exists in the form of FAA AC20-162, issued last September, addressing passive, active and battery-assisted passive RFID tags. Other relevant documents: SAE AS5678, a requirements document for passive-only RFID tags for aerospace; and ATA Spec 2000 Chapter 9, describing data formats.

ARINC has formed a working group to produce RFID guidelines which will take “a big step toward a single solution,” Scheferhoff said.

Upstairs in the Greenway Ballroom, AEEC soldiered through its own weighty agenda, running about an hour late. The engineers started out with briefings by Boeing and Airbus on future technologies and the kinds of applications and systems they’re looking at to comply with the NextGen air-traffic management regime in the United States and SESAR in Europe. “We’ve been looking at standardization and ARINC characteristics, trying to get out ahead of these things and get some interface standards in place before the actual needs arise,” AEEC Chairman Greg Kuehl told me during a break.

I’ll be honored to serve today as moderator of the AEEC symposium, which kicks off at 9 a.m. We’ll hear from:

–Blair Reeves, Southwest Airlines manager of flight operations engineering, on that airline’s fleet wide Required Navigation Performance retrofit;

–Stephen Vail, FedEx Express senior manager of air-traffic operations, on the RTCA NextGen Implementation task force;

–David Bailey, CMC Electronics manager of New Business and Alliances, on retrofitting GPS;

–Rex Fleming, an elected Fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, on a breakthrough process for turbulence detection;

–Christine Haissig, a Fellow with Honeywell Aerospace, on reducing runway incursions;

–Lisa Haskell, Jeppesen senior project manager, Navigation Services, on the Airport Moving Map application;

–David Weiler, Rockwell Collins marketing manager for Aftermarket Avionics Systems, on the NUP runway incursion trials.

Before dashing across the street last night to pen this masterpiece from my room at the Millennium, I had the opportunity to meet with Armand Wong and Hugo Fortes of Miami-based Avionics Support Group, which is sponsoring this blog. ASG’s Constant Friction Mount (CFM) is the first STC’d Class 2 electronic flight bag (EFB) mounting system for transport category aircraft, the company says. Capable of rotating 360 degrees at a 20-degree tilt angle, the CFM has been installed and operating since 2005, starting out on a Miami Air 737.

Speaking of EFBs, tonight will be your last opportunity (here, at least) to catch the Mini EFB Workshop in the ECS suite on the 24th floor of the Hyatt. This is an information-rich presentation given by Merritte DeBuhr, ECS manager of technical program development, that opened my eyes to the complications of Class 2 EFB retrofits when I first attended last year in Tulsa. It’s so good that I asked DeBuhr to serve on the panel of the Avionics Magazine Webinar, “Operators Guide To EFBs,” scheduled May 7.

EFBs are “extremely underestimated,” he counseled during the refresher workshop here Monday night. “It looks simple, it sounds simple, [but] it’s probably one of the most complicated systems I’ve dealt with in the 38 years I’ve been dealing in aviation. I’ve developed EFIS systems for retrofit, for forward-fit airplanes; this thing makes those look like a cakewalk.”

Delta COO Steve Gorman prefaced his keynote speech to the joint AMC, AEEC opening session yesterday by acknowledging that attendees have a full plate of technical issues to discuss over the next few days. He also threw a bone to the seated delegations of airline maintenance and engineering personnel. Delta CEO Richard Anderson, he said, used to run technical operations at Northwest Airlines (he also served as a deputy general counsel, chief operating officer and CEO), so it wasn’t beyond reason that another, future CEO was sitting among the tech-heads.

“Your next CEO of your airline might be sitting right next to you, so be really nice to him,” Gorman said. “It’s a trend. It used to be financial people; now it’s technical operations. I don’t know whether that’s good or bad.”

All kidding aside, Gorman then launched into a substantial, 38-minute explanation of Delta’s mega-merger with Northwest that filled in the lines, and then some, of the press release Delta issued the same day. While Gorman was speaking in Minneapolis, Delta announced from Atlanta that 40,000 Northwest flight attendants, pilots, airport lounge representatives and ticket and gate agents will henceforth wear Delta uniforms. New Delta signage now adorns 400 ticket counters, gates and baggage claim areas at Detroit, Memphis and Minneapolis-St. Paul. The airline plans to have all of its domestic airport locations rebranded by year-end, with international locations following in 2010.

“Until now,” Delta said, “significant post-merger changes, such as synchronizing flight schedules, aligning route maps, integrating technologies and work groups, have largely taken place behind the scenes.”

For the benefit of AMC and AEEC attendees, Gorman pulled the curtain aside on some of that post-merger activity. Integrating operations under a single operating certificate from FAA — Delta’s goal by the end of the year, has been a challenge. Between the two airlines there are 325 manuals and 110 major processes, he said.

“We start with the manuals and start looking for the differences — 325 manuals is just mind-boggling. Think of that when you have two airlines with that much heritage and history and both of them have been the product of a tremendous amount of mergers and acquisitions over the years,” Gorman related.

“This is not a time for innovation,” he added — something you usually don’t hear from a corporate executive. “No matter what process we use, we want to make sure we have subject matter experts at one of the two certificates that know that process, that can help in the course of putting together implementation and training programs and changing the manuals. … The last thing we want is something that no one knows about that we have to train everybody on.”

The former Greyhound Lines CEO who reduced the bus fleet and optimized routes before leaving in 2007 now finds himself overseeing the world’s largest airline, with 751 aircraft of 10 different types, flying more than 6,000 daily departures to 379 destinations. According to some “fun facts,” Gorman presented, Delta’s longest flight spans 8,502 miles from Atlanta to Mumbai; it’s shortest 49 miles.

“The question I get a lot internally is how in the heck can you have this many different fleets and make money? … We need those different [aircraft] sizes in order to maximize the revenue on the breadth of the network we have,” Gorman explained.

But Delta plans to keep its many-colored marbles and even build on the Airbus competencies of its Delta TechOps business to self-service its own enlarged fleet and more. Right now, Delta has in-house capabilities for less than 20 components on the Airbus A330 ranging to 1,200 on the Boeing 767. It will look at “what makes sense” to expand its capabilities into the Airbus fleet, and leverage that in the third-party MRO market.

While both airlines outsource heavy airframe checks, Delta comes to this marriage with a dramatically different philosophy when it comes to maintenance, Gorman said.

“The Delta philosophy has been, with the exception of the heavy airframe checks, where we have core competencies that we can continue to perform maintenance for all the Delta fleet in-house, to do so, but also to have an eye on what we can sell aggressively in the third-party MRO market,” he said. “From the Northwest standpoint, the philosophy [was to] outsource all of the maintenance, except for line maintenance in Detroit and Minneapolis. I can tell you unequivocally, going forward, the philosophy will be the Delta philosophy, where we will perform most of our maintenance in-house, we will always be looking at make versus buy.”

In other business, as we used to say in the newspaper world, the Airline Avionics Institute (AAI) bestowed Volare Awards to Bob Saffell of Rockwell Collins, in the Avionics Manufacturer category; Denis Michal of Thales, Avionics Product Support; Larry Patterson, Boeing, Avionics Engineering; Mark Sorensen of Northwest Airlines, Avionics Maintenance; and Rolf Goedecke of Airbus, the AAI Special Award.

Thor Stier of Airbus was awarded the AMC Roger Goldberg Award for extraordinary contributions. Axel Mueller, general manager with Lufthansa Technik in Tulsa and AMC Steering Group chairman, was named Man of the Decade.

Mueller, who started as an apprentice with Lufthansa in 1961, said he will retire this year and move back to Hamburg. There, he plans to indulge in music and teach his grandson “to become a good engineer and trumpet player.”

It’s good to be back in the heartland, the stout state over which Jesse Ventura once presided and for which Al Franken now goes to Congress. Or is it Norm Coleman? Never mind.

I had consulted weatherchannel.com more than usual before coming here yesterday, trying to come to terms with the 30-degree swing from where I live in Washington, D.C. This is one cold place in the winter, and even in late March my hands were chilled while walking down Nicollet Mall from Ike’s Food and Cocktails, where I had a stout dinner with Joe Milroy, Avionics Magazine East Coast sales manager. From Ike’s I headed to the Hyatt Regency, where the Aeroflex reception was getting underway.

These two meetings taking place at the Hyatt are among my favorite events to attend, and I’m not just talking about the company suites in the evening. Two years ago, in an Avionics Magazine “Editor’s Note,” I referred to AMC as a “Jury of Peers.” The judicial comparison works when you consider how this conference is structured. Airlines submit discussion items — oftentimes complaints — pertaining to avionics equipment and maintenance practices. The suppliers in attendance, seated on either side of the main column of airline representatives, are required to stand up and either explain or defend their actions. There may be a lot of camaraderie in the hallways and suites, but no one is spared the hot seat when airlines are displeased.

AMC delegates this year can look forward to 240 discussion items, with one late question — so make it 241.

AEEC is a somewhat more reserved gathering, although the debates here can be lively too. Some topics of discussion to watch, I’m told, include the Navigation Data Base Open Standard (NDBX) and Airbus proposals to standardize a fiber optic adapter for Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) installations and to redefine work on Supplement 1 to ARINC 633, EFB datalink applications, to retain backward compatibility with software fitted on new A380s. (This is a good opportunity to mention the Avionics Magazine Webinar, “Operators Guide To EFBs,” scheduled May 7. Details available at aviationtoday.com.)

Considering the recent acquisition of host airline Northwest by Delta Air Lines, I also look forward to today’s keynote speech by Stephen Gorman, Delta COO and executive vice president. Gorman has served as a senior executive for some iconic brands, including Greyhound Lines and Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. While CEO of Greyhound from 2003 to 2007, he spearheaded a reduction of the bus fleet and a restructuring of routes to focus on short and medium-length trips over longer ones. The way things are going with the economy and the airline industry, it must seem like déjà vu all over again to Gorman.

No doubt you know the “NWA”-branded aircraft overflying the Minneapolis skyline on our handy Avionics Magazine Pocket Guide is a fleeting image. The Northwest brand is being phased out and Delta’s name and brand will replace it. Northwest’s three avionics shops will be incorporated in the Delta TechOps avionics operation in Atlanta, where some 200 technicians work across seven shops.

Did I mention company suites? The Pocket Guide lists no fewer than 31 suites from the first to the 24th floors. Been hitting the corporate credit card a little much lately? You can get your fill at any one of these, plus partake in the networking that makes these conferences such well-rounded events. You’ll likely find me in line for the custom crepes at the Thales/ACSS suite.

Collocation is the name of the game. This year, for the first time in recent history, the annual AMC and AEEC conferences organized by ARINC Industry Activities (IA) will share both a venue and an opening session. Their separate discussion tracks have been synchronized so that engineers and maintainers alike can attend discussions that may be of mutual interest.

The AMC Annual Meeting and the AEEC General Session kick off Monday at 9:30 a.m., at the Hyatt Regency Minneapolis, with a joint Opening Session. After that, AMC convenes in the Nicollet Ballroom; AEEC decamps to the Greenway Ballroom.

This year also marks the 60th anniversary for the two conferences, which emerged from a common beginning.

The back page of the powder blue AMC Program offers a good history. To summarize: in 1949, the ARINC board of directors instructed the Airlines Electronic Engineering Committee — AEEC — to hold maintenance meetings. The meetings were held once a year on the day following the regular AEEC meetings. “By 1955, it was evident to the AEEC and the ARINC Industry Activities staff that the maintenance activity justified an organization in its own right,” which led to the formation of the Airlines Electronic Maintenance Meeting (AEMM). In 1957, the two groups began scheduling their meetings at different locations on separate dates. AEMM was changed to AMC in 1967.

The collocated annual meetings represent an ongoing evolution for ARINC Industry Activities. The unit since 2007 has operated under new ownership following the acquisition of ARINC by The Carlyle Group. That same year, AMC, AEEC and a third conference — the Flight Simulator Engineering and Maintenance Conference — shed their longer titles for acronyms and transitioned to membership organizations.

Collocation was both a cultural and a logistical challenge, and was not undertaken lightly. I can attest to the care and concern underpinning these meetings after interviewing the principals in a recent conference call and meeting with IA staff over a seafood lunch in Annapolis, ARINC’s headquarters.

Here are some excerpts from the conference call.

What, I asked, is the motivation behind combining the AMC and AEEC annual meetings?

“Our primary motivation is to get more benefit for the attendees, and more exposure for both aspects of [airline] operations,” said AEEC Chairman Greg Kuehl, of UPS. “There are relationships between the specifications and the maintenance sides and there are interdependencies and common concerns. For attendees in general, it’s more of a one-stop shop. Hopefully, we make their travel and their time more effective and more
efficient.”

Asked if collocating the conferences makes sense given the state of the economy and the challenges airlines face, Kuehl said, “Yes it does. Conditions, unfortunately, are making it look more attractive all the time. We all have fewer people and lower budgets. If we can get more benefit for a given person’s time, effort and travel cost, we’re certainly willing to give that a try.”

Some of the respective AMC and AEEC sessions have been synchronized to better connect the conferences. Sam Buckwalter, AMC executive secretary, and Mike Russo, his AEEC counterpart, coordinated their planning efforts to ensure the agendas don’t in any way conflict. Future meetings may even see the AMC and AEEC symposia combined, however, that option was ruled out for the first year, Buckwalter said.

“The idea was to stagger the sessions so that someone who is a communications expert could attend both meetings and cover communications in both meetings,” Kuehl said. “We’re going to try to split them up so that they’re close, so if you’re a comm guy you don’t have the AEEC portion on Monday and the AMC session on Thursday. The main point is efficiency.”

The airline community has been generally receptive to the idea of collocating the conferences, organizers said.

“From the point of view of the AMC Steering Group and the AEEC Executive Committee, you’ve got more than two dozen airlines, and there is broad concurrence among those airlines that this is the right thing to do,” said AEEC organizer Roy Oishi, a member of the ARINC IA staff. “From the outside we don’t have as much feedback. We will get that at the meeting itself.”

Tomorrow: What to look for at AMC, AEEC.

Participants at the Avionics Maintenance Conference plugged away at the list of 233 discussion topics, compiled in a thick booklet, that are meant to settle airline-vendor beefs over parts and service. There is nothing better (or worse) than a jury of your peers and customers. Holding forth at microphones positioned around a conference hall configured with airline representatives in the center and vendors on either side, company representatives explained, defended, even apologized for delayed deliveries or faulty parts. The discussion topics range from the substantial–for example, how to standardize and digitize the hundreds of service bulletins airlines receive each year–to the relatively minor. “Why is Honeywell giving an email address of somebody who has no intention to answer questions?” KLM huffed.

Make no mistake; this is a two-way street. Air Canada queried why Honeywell hadn’t provided price lists and schematics for latest revisions to an air data intertial reference unit. Honeywell asked whether Air Canada indeed flies the Airbus A320 and Boeing 767 aircraft referenced, “to clarify whether operators and MROs (maintenance, repair and overhaul organizations) are asking questions not necessarily pertaining to their fleet type.” KLM also complained that the relevant person at Goodrich is hard to find. After explaining the situation, Goodrich’s representative offered that, “in the future, when unsure of the contact person, our Web site can be of great help.”
There has been talk of funding and organizational issues with AMC, but this is constructive discussion and good theater. Let’s hope this forum continues.

The Avionics Maintenance Conference (AMC) opened today with a clear appeal to non-contributing airlines to step up and support the annual technical meeting organized by ARINC. “Unfortunately, there is a lack of interest regarding the funding of AMC,” Axel Mueller of Lufthansa Technik, who chairs the AMC Steering Committee, said at the outset. “Nothing in life is for free, so in order to have a successful AMC, we need to financially support it in a balanced and fair manner.”

Mueller then announced an “operators-only” session Tuesday that sounded like some airlines would be taken to the woodshed for avoiding new membership agreements. “We will express our concerns during that meeting,” he said, diplomatically. “We will also have to discuss the consequences if funding issues are not resolved.”

If airlines need to reduce their operating costs to better afford things like, say, AMC membership, they could look to exhibitors at the Avionics magazine product showcase for direction. For instance, Inertial Aerospace Services, of Highland Heights, Ohio, has saved American Airlines (a committed AMC supporter, by the way) $2 million annually by repairing the display glass assembly associated with Honeywell LCD displays.

As the name suggests Inertial Aerospace Services specializes in the repair and overhaul of inertial navigation and reference equipment; it claims it was the first non-OEM company to begin doing so more than 10 years ago. More recently, the company added things like LCD subassemblies and pilot cursor controls to its repertoire. “These are repairs that the OEMs deemed as throwaways,” said Tony Wright, Inertial Aerospace Services director of marketing.

Wright explained that it used to cost $76,000 (since reduced) to replace, rather than repair, a display glass assembly, and American Airlines was changing out 10 a month. “You can’t even get a glass from Honeywell any more,“ he said. “You have to upgrade the whole unit.“ At the AMC conference four years ago, “everybody screamed and hollered. That’s when we got into the game. American Airlines … was begging us to get this done.” Inertial Aerospace Services usually can overhaul an assembly for 50 percent cheaper, he said.

John Leslie, president of North American Aviation Supply, was visiting from Shirley, Long Island. His company overhauls things like electrical power generators, relays and micro-pumps that move water to aircraft lavatories and galleys. He wants to be the sole repairer in these areas; otherwise he’s not interested. “It’s nice for us to be able to pick and choose our markets,” Leslie said. “We’re not everything to everyone.” But in its chosen markets, “we can do it quicker and better than OEMs can.”

It would be a shame if financial troubles undermined AMC. Whether on the conference floor, the exhibit floor or in the numerous, company-sponsored suites overflowing with wine and cheese and good cheer, it is, above all else, an opportunity to discuss new ideas and alternatives. There might even be some money saved.

Dateline: Amsterdam

Avionics 2007 wrapped up today (Thursday) after two days of sustained activity on the exhibition floor and the prospect of further growth next year. This year’s conference featured 75 exhibitors, 50 percent more than in 2006, and by the first day, reportedly, 75 had rebooked for next year’s conference. The aptly named Avionics 2008 will return to this charming city of bicycles and canals, but at a new venue to be announced.

Why the growth? Avionics will be the linchpin of the future air traffic management environment, and already figure prominently in the building blocks of that environment, including Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast and Required Navigational Performance. Presenters at the conference portion, including representatives of Rockwell Collins, cargo airline UPS and Avtech Sweden AB, are at the leading edge of those developments at places like Louisville, Ken. (the UPS hub), and Stockholm-Arlanda Airport.

But just like GPS became a commodity technology readily available in handheld devices, new-generation systems like ADS-B are going mainstream. On the exhibition floor, Muirhead Avionics of the UK, serving as the agent for Kinetic Avionic Products Ltd., advertised Kinetic’s SBS-1 “Real-Time Virtual Radar,” a low-cost, Mode S receiver with ADS-B capability for training purposes and the “aviation enthusiast.” The system, including receiver, antenna, Basestation software and USB cable, retails for a tidy 500 British pounds. Connected to an everyday PC, the system displays ADS-B aircraft hits, including heading, altitude, vertical climb rate, lat/long and call number.

Aircraft spotting has risen to new heights. “There’s a lot of people who want them,” said Muirhead Sales Manager Gino Masoero. “They’re selling like hot cakes.”

Day 1 at the Avionics 2007 conference. The weather analogy in my opening remarks fell flat. Tuesday saw a driving rain and unsettling wind gusts in Amsterdam. Battling across the plaza to reach the Expo XXI conference center evoked epic images – let’s say the Charge of the Light Brigade in 1854. But the audience on Wednesday didn’t seem moved by Tennyson’s prose recalling that fateful cavalry charge: Ours is “not to reason why … but to do and die.”

Nevertheless, these are epic times in aviation. A panel of experts in the area of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles argued forcibly that UAVs are proliferating and, interestingly, driving development of air-traffic management concepts that will affect their manned counterparts. Of note for avionics suppliers: “sense and avoid” systems making use of electro-optical, infrared, radar or other sensors to ensure proper separation and collision avoidance will be de rigeur.

Afternoon presentations emphasized the importance of flight management systems in achieving “performance-based” requirements of the future Air Traffic Management environment. Okko Bleeker, director of European research and development for Rockwell Collins, was a late addition to the agenda, but gave perhaps the most interesting presentation. Bleeker said Rockwell Collins has coupled flight management and ground-based “deconfliction” functions to produce significant efficiencies on Scandinavian Airlines flights. The coordinated air/ground functions could make human intervention of flight paths the exception, rather than the rule, Bleeker said.

The conversation continues with presentations on 4-D Navigation, Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast and Required Navigational Performance.

Some of us like to position ourselves (in our dreams, anyway) as central figures in historically trying times. But there is some justification for that sentiment among those, like myself, who are trooping to Amsterdam this week for the “Avionics 2007” conference and exhibition. After all, none other than FAA says “we are at a critical point” in the transition to NextGen, the new buzz word formerly known as the Next-Generation Air Transportation System. I personally liked “Free Flight,” but nothing’s for free—certainly not NextGen.

How will we cope with double or triple the air traffic we have today? I can’t see us handling much more based on the snake of a queue and frayed tempers I experienced recently at Washington Dulles International. Who—or what—will referee the flock of VLJs and UAVs rolling off the production lines? Will Net-Centric Operations really be seamless and flawless and impervious to sabotage? What is it with these software guys, and why does the future of air travel seem to rest in their hands? Can they really deliver source code that is “provably secure?”

These are just some of the musings I’m entertaining in the run-up to Avionics 2007, March 7-8, at Expo XXII in Amsterdam. No doubt the high-level presenters we have lined up, representing Eurocontrol, the Dutch National Aerospace Laboratory, Australia’s Defense Science Technology Organization, Airbus, Boeing, Rockwell Collins—to name a few—will provide valuable insight on these matters.

Somewhat by an accident of history, I have been designated the conference chairman—the wielder of the gavel and the decider for lunch. Just how I pictured it: a central figure in historically trying times.