Attila™ vs. The Global Economy
Over central Virginia, the chime announcing an incoming message from company operations sounded in the cockpit. Looking at the ACARS screen, we saw that our aircraft had been assigned a one-minute change in arrival time at the 40-mile gate to Atlanta’s terminal airspace. Attila™ was alive.
This Attila™ … … not that one.
Attila the Hun
Attila the Process. Courtesy ATH Group.
Background
The first priority of ATC is to maintain safe-separation distance between aircraft. It does this through a stringent architecture of command and control, which rations aviation infrastructure for the purpose of safety. This has historically, and necessarily, relegated economic efficiency to a lesser priority. While this architecture has been sufficient for increasing U.S. economic growth for the past 50 years, it is no longer sufficient for increasing growth amid the globally constrained resources of the 21st century. Accordingly, a method must be found for providing safe aircraft separation and economic efficiency.
Being somewhat aware of this problem, the U.S. Congress, DOT, and FAA have shown a propensity for trying to solve it by layering in increasingly complex methods of command and control. In turn, this has generated a need for various forms of industry self-help for improving efficiency. Attila™ is one of those forms.
Attila ™ is Entrepreneurial Self-Help, But it is Not a Free-Market Solution.
Attila™ is admirable as an entrepreneurial creation. And it is effective as a privately refined extension of existing architecture in air traffic control. But V1 believes it is important to make clear that Attila™ is not an example of the 21st century changes which will be necessary in air traffic control for creating a holistic increase in system-wide economic efficiency. The difference lies between a current system that treats a 50-seat regional jet much the same as a 500-seat wide body jet – and a future system that will need to create market-based incentives for prioritizing seat and freight throughput over mere aircraft throughput.
What Attila™ Is …
Several years ago, a private enterprise was formed by a senior air traffic controller and a commercial pilot. They had seen how the over-arching construct of ATC created a need for more efficient traffic sequencing into the world’s busiest airport; Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. More importantly, they saw how that need could be partially mitigated through a commercially operated self-help system which could operate within the constraints of ATC. The result was Attila™.
Privately developed by ATH Group, Attila™ is a proprietary traffic optimization system that is used solely by Delta Air Lines at Hartsfield- Jackson airport. The system seeks to mitigate the economic inefficiencies necessarily caused by safe-separation by optimizing Delta traffic flow into the company’s key hub. To do this, it targets two main metrics:
- Minimum aircraft ‘dwell time’ from point of entrance into the Atlanta terminal area to touchdown at the airport.
- Maximum utilization of landing ‘slots’ – which can also be regarded as maximum arrival rate on a minute-by-minute basis.
Attila’s™ key product is the assignment of a one or two minute change in arrival time to each Delta aircraft inbound to one of the 40-nautical-mile entry gates defining Atlanta’s terminal airspace. The system makes this one-time assignment far enough away from Atlanta so as to require a minimum change in speed. In this manner, Attila™ creates privately generated marginal improvements in efficiency to the FAA’s fixed system of command and control – as it operates independently of, subordinate to, and transparent to ATC.
The best candidates for realizing the capabilities of Attila™ are aircraft which are inside or just outside of the 15-minute late arrival window, as defined by the DOT. Attila’s™ purpose is to sequence these aircraft onto a segmented time-slot conveyor (i.e. one-minute arrival slots at the runway) beginning at the 40-nautical-mile entry gate, and terminating on the runway. This segmented time-slot conveyor has a tangible cousin in the segmented moving sidewalks found in many airports. Imagine a group of individuals approaching a moving sidewalk being sequenced to occupy one segment per individual; instead of merely crowding together to within minimum personal distance (minimum safe-separation distance for aircraft) as they randomly boarded the sidewalk.
What Attila™ Is Not …
A key metric of Attila’s™ success is the measure of ‘slot recovery’ at Hartsfield-Jackson airport. Prior to the earliest implementation of the system in 2006, the safely-separated but random arrival of aircraft over each of the terminal airspace entry gates resulted in the ineffective utilization of arrival ‘slots’. Since then, the latest ‘Attila™ Scoreboard’ published by ATH Group indicates that over 16,000 slots have been ‘recovered’ – meaning those time-slot conveyor segments have been spared from arriving at the runway empty.
But to Attila™, an airplane is an airplane, regardless of whether it is a 50-seat regional jet or a 500-seat wide body jet. Accordingly, the measure of ‘slot recovery’ is a good metric if you are merely counting aircraft delivered per hour – and for a system constrained by the domination of the FAA’s command and control architecture. Conversely, ‘slot recovery’ would be a poor metric if the systemic goal of the national air transportation system were the throughput of the greatest amount of seat and freight capacity per resources consumed – arrival ‘slots’ being one of them.
Accordingly, while Attila™ is a private system for increasing efficiency at one airport, it would seem an inappropriate precedent to consider for including in an air transportation system that will need to incentivize the economically efficient throughput of passenger and freight volume. By economically efficient, I mean minimum consumption of resources for the maximum generation of value – in this case, GDP. Unfortunately, that is neither the current nor the future stated goal of the national air transportation system, so ‘slot recovery’ passes as a privately enhanced and financially suitable measure of air transportation efficiency at the world’s busiest airport.
For efficiency, turn to the market.
As an alternative, V1 continues to propose that in order for the U.S. to compete as an economically efficient contender in the global economy of the 21st century, the goal of the U.S. air transportation system should be the market-based allocation of national aviation resources at the granular level, instead of the command-and-control-based rationing of those resources at the aggregate level. Anything the U.S. Congress, DOT or FAA has proposed to date neither defines nor addresses that goal.
