Fixing the Skies for the Next Gen

摘要

For more than a decade, the Federal Aviation Administration has been working to restructure the airspace over the US. One way the FAA is doing that is through the Next Generation Air Transportation System, or, for short, NextGen. It is a major overhaul of the national airspace infrastructure aiming to modernize and simplify the current system, said Edward L. Bolton Jr., the assistant administrator for NextGen at the FAA. The United States has the world's largest controlled airspace of five million square miles-and it is the most diverse, most complex, and safest. Yet, with the current aging system, a rising number of passengers, and other factors, the US aviation industry has been looking to find ways to modernize the airspace for quite some time, said Bolton, a retired Air Force major general, at the Air Force Association's Air & Space Conference in National Harbor, Md., in September.