In a move expected to speed the adoption of Required Navigation Performance approaches and departures by U.S. airlines, the FAA has approved the first third-party provider to design these custom procedures.
Naverus is already helping Required Navigation Performance (RNP) to proliferate in the Asia-Pacific region and in Canada, and it has developed 350 of the 400 RNP procedures in use worldwide, says Eric Nordling, vice president of marketing for the Kent, Wash.-based company. Naverus RNP specialists have designed approaches and departures for Airbus, Boeing, Air China, Air New Zealand, Qantas and Virgin Blue among other airlines. In addition, they have designed approaches and departures for use by WestJet in Canada at every airport that the airline serves. Naverus owns the procedures, which are rented to WestJet.
WHILE THE FAA is publishing RNP procedures on its own for "public use" at the rate of 25 a year, Naverus will now be able to contract with U.S. airlines and airports (as it already does with Asia-Pacific carriers) to develop customized procedures. This could cost a few hundred thousand dollars or more for procedures at one airport, depending on the complexity. But by designing procedures to provide optimal flight paths for a particular model aircraft (the Boeing 737NG for example) on a precise flight path, the custom approach could save an airline millions of dollars in fuel bills per year, according to Nordling.
However, the Professional Airways Systems Specialists (PASS), a union that represents FAA workers who design RNP procedures, expressed alarm over the agency's third-party decision.
RNP procedures use GPS or DME-DME navigation to confine an aircraft in a very tight corridor of airspace and are good for keeping aircraft a safe distance from high terrain or restricted airspace. A "public" RNP approach developed by the FAA for use at Washington's Reagan National Airport, for example, keeps aircraft flying down the Potomac River in instrument conditions as if it were a VFR day while avoiding restricted airspace over the White House and the Capitol.
Naverus was also recently approved to assist airlines and airports in completing the FAA process to apply to fly RNP procedures. The application can run to 800 pages. The FAA's Alison Duquette says the agency hopes that having consultants provide aid to airlines in this process will speed the deployment.
Despite the FAA's stated intention to accelerate the adoption of RNP, some airline and aircraft industry leaders have expressed frustration at the progress. It should be noted that RNP was first employed by Alaska Airlines in the mid-1990s. One critic, Dave Nakamura of Boeing, the chairman of the FAA's Performance-Based Operations Aviation Rulemaking Committee, said earlier this year that not enough RNP procedures have been developed in the U.S. and not enough different models of airline aircraft have been certified for this type of flying.
Naverus was formed in 2003 by former Alaska Airlines technical pilots including Steve Fulton, who is now the company's chief technology officer. One of the most recent RNP projects was completed in February for the Civil Aviation Authority of China and Air China at Jiuzhaigou. The terrain-challenged airport in Sichuan Province is located at an elevation of 11,311 ft. The procedure there is customized to provide optimum flight paths for Air China's fleet of Boeing 757s. Naverus has also designed RNP procedures for Air China at Lhasa and Linzhi in Tibet (AW&ST Sept. 25, 2006, p. 52).