Red For La Guardia, Brown for J.F.K.

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

At first glance, the image that flashed on the 19-inch computer screen looked like an ordinary road map. Then John Richardson, acting manager of the Federal Aviation Administration's Central Flow Control Facility in Washington, began tapping at his keyboard. With one stroke he zoomed in to an aerial view of the New York metropolitan area, divided not along town or county lines but along sectors of airspace. With another keystroke he eliminated hundreds of tiny black dots showing the location of low-flying aircraft and private jets. What remained on the screen were larger, winged symbols representing commercial airliners. With a few more key taps he color-coded the jetliners according to their airport destination: red for La Guardia, green for Newark, brown for John F. Kennedy.

To computer buffs at ease with the graphic virtuosity of Max Headroom, the FAA demonstration might seem primitive. But to air-traffic professionals gathered in the agency's sixth-floor "war room," it represented a technological breakthrough. Prior to last week, FAA radar data showing the location of planes flying over the U.S. could be shown only piecemeal on computer screens at one or more of the aviation agency's 20 regional control centers. Now, all that information has been merged and displayed on a single cathode-ray screen, giving the nation's air-traffic controllers an unprecedented view of overhead traffic patterns as they unfold from coast to coast. Exclaimed the FAA's Richardson, with pardonable pride: "It's unbelievable!"

Well, at least impressively intricate. Last week's display -- more evolutionary than revolutionary -- involved the funneling of data on aircraft position, altitude, speed and identification from each of the regional air- traffic control centers to the FAA's Washington headquarters. There the information is merged into a manageable whole by an assembly of Apollo workstations and displayed via custom-designed software on as many as three dozen screens. The objective of the system is to provide centralized management of traffic problems as they may build up at any of the country's 12,500 airports. Cost of the new computer operation so far: about $2 million. The FAA's ultimate goal, though, is a multibillion-dollar air-traffic control ) system so highly automated that it can monitor flights and direct pilots with little or no human intervention.

Such a system is far in the future, but the new linkup may have arrived just in time. A badly overburdened U.S. air-traffic system has pushed control tower errors and airborne near misses to record levels. In the first three months of 1987, midair close calls increased 13%, to about 215, while errors by overtaxed air controllers jumped 18%. The looming safety crisis prompted James Barnett, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, to recommend earlier this month that the FAA take "immediate action" to reduce air traffic at key airports before the anticipated summer air-travel crush.

FAA officials say that with their new control system they will be able to meet those recommendations without reducing the number of flights entering or leaving the critical choke points. Using the new computers, supervisors can monitor with greater precision specific sections of airspace that are becoming dangerously overcrowded. Traffic jams can then be alleviated or prevented by shifting the altitude of some flights or rerouting others so that they bypass congested areas. By this fall, when more complex computer programs should be in place, controllers hope to be able to predict at least two hours in advance when an airspace sector is about to become saturated, and thus prevent delays. Says Jack Ryan, director of the FAA's Air Traffic Operations Service: "We will be ready to head off problems before they occur."

The FAA's glowing new capability is attracting curiosity from other federal agencies. The Defense Department, which must monitor the flow of aircraft into the U.S.'s air defense identification zone, is said to be fascinated by the new system. So is the Drug Enforcement Administration, which desperately seeks to know the identity of every aircraft entering U.S. airspace, especially those from the south. They are particularly impressed with an FAA feature that allows controllers to place an electronic cursor over an individual blip, press a key and see all the available aircraft data displayed on the screen. Any blip that fails to provide information has not registered a flight plan with the FAA and may be fair game for interception.

With reporting by Jerry Hannifin/Washington