The Business Case

This is the fifth post in a series on the two-decade resistance to ADS-B In, the technology the NTSB says would have prevented the Flight 5342 collision (part one: The Original Sin).

When we last left our band of merry FAA bureaucrats and aviation industry lobbyists, the FAA’s aviation rulemaking committee (ARC), co-chaired by representatives of the airline and business-aviation lobbying groups, issued its report to the FAA on ADS-B Out.

Even though the NTSB and the Air Line Pilots Association had both asked the FAA to reconsider the decision to exclude ADS-B In — the technology that would actually give pilots critical warnings if they were on a collision course with another aircraft — the ARC stayed narrowly focused on ADS-B Out, noting:

Although the ARC believes that there are potentially more benefits from ADS-B In than there are for ADS-B Out only, it also believes that at this point ADS-B In is not well enough defined for the FAA to do its required economic analysis and proceed forward with an ADS-B In rule.

When the FAA issued its notice of proposed rulemaking for ADS-B Out, Spencer was still nine months from being born. On the day the ADS-B Out report dropped, Spencer was 10 weeks old and still living with a foster family in Seoul, South Korea. By the time the FAA issued its final rule on ADS-B Out in May 2010, Christine and I had traveled to Seoul, welcomed Spencer into our family, and had spent a year learning that we were in over our heads with a toddler who never stopped moving.

But that was just the start of the ADS-B Out clock. Airlines and other aircraft operators would have until January 1, 2020, to equip their aircraft with ADS-B Out.

The road to half a solution started before Spencer was born and didn’t require aircraft operators to comply until he was an 11-year-old.

By then, he still hadn’t stopped moving, but he was well into his Starbucks era and, critically, had mastered matching his drink to his hair.

This gives you a feel for the time scale of aviation safety reform. A small win for an industry lobbyist can buy a decade of institutionalized delay.

With ADS-B In successfully decoupled from the 2020 ADS-B Out deadline, it got a rulemaking committee of its own in June 2010. Representatives of the same airline and business-aviation lobbying groups that co-chaired the ADS-B Out committee also held the reins for the ADS-B In rulemaking committee.

I’m sure you will be shocked to learn that when they produced their report to the FAA a little over a year later, they recommended against an ADS-B In mandate. They also put Play 2 (Never miss an opportunity to buy time) on repeat by calling for ADS-B In equipage to be completely voluntary “for the foreseeable future.”

The committee did at least make a nominal mention of safety in its report, conceding that “some of the ADS-B In applications are mature and could result in increased safety margins and improved aircrew situational awareness.”

But don’t forget Play 4 (Define the decision criteria on your terms). Safety impact is not how the FAA and industry make decisions about ADS-B.

Money is.

And as they laid out their business case analysis of ADS-B In, the committee noted that, for each airliner, only “9 percent of the benefits ($16,000 annually in 2025) come from situational awareness applications.”

$16,000, the price of a mediocre used car, is the value they assigned to giving airline pilots visibility of nearby aircraft and a chance to see a collision coming.

When a midair collision that the NTSB said would have been prevented by ADS-B In occurred on January 29, 2025, 67 people were killed.

I think the value of situational awareness that night would have been a bit higher.