Today’s American Airlines flight 1916 from Dallas/Fort Worth to Connecticut’s Bradley International Airport just landed in the aviation history books — and marked a new era in U.S. airspace modernization. Captain Brian Will flew the 737 using a high-tech, computerized flight path known as RNP — which stands for Required Navigation Performance technology. Put simply, RNP allows planes to follow highly precise, customized, gently curving paths that eliminate the inefficient straight-line flight segments — most noticeable in stair step landing approaches — that take longer to fly, burn more fuel, churn out more emissions and can add to air traffic congestion and delayed flights. What makes today’s flight historic is that it’s the first time a U.S. flight has used a publicly available, commercially designed RNP flight path. Prior to the path becoming a permanent fixture at Bradley, the FAA had designed all public RNP paths in the U.S. Now, with a third party — GE Aviation’s Naverus business — getting the green light to publish the path, the gateway is open for widespread adoption of the technology. As GE’s Steve Fulton says in the audio interview below, “Our vision is that there are going to be thousands of these procedures required as part of the transition underway in the United States.”Today’s American Airlines flight 1916 from Dallas/Fort Worth to Connecticut’s Bradley International Airport just landed in the aviation history books — and marked a new era in U.S. airspace modernization. Captain Brian Will flew the 737 using a high-tech, computerized flight path known as RNP — which stands for Required Navigation Performance technology. Put simply, RNP allows planes to follow highly precise, customized, gently curving paths that eliminate the inefficient straight-line flight segments — most noticeable in stair step landing approaches — that take longer to fly, burn more fuel, churn out more emissions and can add to air traffic congestion and delayed flights. What makes today’s flight historic is that it’s the first time a U.S. flight has used a publicly available, commercially designed RNP flight path. Prior to the path becoming a permanent fixture at Bradley, the FAA had designed all public RNP paths in the U.S. Now, with a third party — GE Aviation’s Naverus business — getting the green light to publish the path, the gateway is open for widespread adoption of the technology. As GE’s Steve Fulton says in the audio interview below, “Our vision is that there are going to be thousands of these procedures required as part of the transition underway in the United States.”
Pathfinders: The animation above shows how the new Bradley flight path can maximize use of the runway when there’s low cloud cover. Since RNP procedures can provide different benefits, depending on their design, GE specifically designed the Bradley approach to give pilots continuous vertical guidance when the cloud ceiling is as low as 350 feet above the ground. The previous cloud ceiling was 1,000 feet above the ground.
With about 350 flights a day, Bradley is the largest commercial airport in Connecticut and the second largest in New England next to Boston’s Logan Airport. The new RNP path will allow pilots to fly independent of aging ground-based navigation beacons that limit where the aircraft can go. As a result, airliners will be able to land on Bradley’s Runway 15 during periods of low clouds and visibility that previously would have stopped them from landing there.
In the audio interview below, GE’s Steve Fulton, a former Alaska Airlines pilot who co-founded Naverus and developed the world’s first RNP flight paths in the mid-1990s, explains the technology and what passengers should expect as the entire airspace system modernizes over the next 20 years. Says Steve: “For passengers on the airplane, the thing that will be most noticeable is the ability to have an airplane depart on time and arrive on time. So schedules will begin to mean something again.”
Dubbed a “highway in the sky,” RNP is a core component of the FAA’s NextGen airspace modernization plan. Without new RNP flight paths and other essential upgrades, FAA estimates that by 2015 the current air traffic control system — which relies on World War II-era radar and technologies — will be unable to handle the 50 percent increase in airplanes and passengers expected over the next decade. FAA’s NextGen plan is to shift to a satellite-based GPS system.
 On time: Click on the image to use an interactive data visualization that shows how optimized flight paths save fuel and time versus traditional ones. As you can see, landing in Stockholm uses 68 percent less fuel. |
 Smooth moves: Captain Brian Will and GE’s Steve Fulton arrive at Bradley International Airport after completing the debut flight. |
* Read today’s announcement
* Read coverage from Bloomberg
* Learn more about RNP on the Naverus website
Learn more in these GE Reports stories:
* “Threading the needle: Flight path tech aids quake relief”
* “Not all approaches are created equal”
* “Jump into GE’s integrated cockpit at Paris Air Show”
* Read more GE Aviation stories
