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Watchdog Targets Another Faulty FAA System For Review

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Ethan Barton Editor in Chief
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A beleaguered, expensive technology designed to improve and streamline commercial aircraft flight paths is under federal scrutiny after causing hundreds of delays, a government watchdog announced Friday.

The $2.7 billion En Route Automation Modernization (ERAM) system was designed to decrease delays by using satellite-based navigation, but has repeatedly failed since before its official March 2015 launch, according to the Department of Transportation inspector general.

“These ERAM outages have disrupted air traffic and resulted in hundreds of delayed and cancelled flights, impacting thousands of travelers and raising questions about the system’s stability,” the IG said.

The watchdog is auditing the ERAM system at the request of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. The IG will investigate the cause of ERAM’s delays, the Federal Aviation Administration’s responses and if the system’s features were cut in exchange for an earlier launch.

ERAM is part of FAA’s massive, decades-long air traffic control overhaul project called NextGen. The Daily Caller News Foundation has extensively reported on NextGen’s abundance of failures, delays and cost increases.

ERAM was originally supposed to launch in 2010 for $2.1 billion, for example. The IG predicted many of the cost increases, delays and failures over the years, including those highlighted in Friday’s announced audit.

Additionally, one 2014 ERAM failure nearly caused “catastrophic” results, TheDCNF reported in July.

Many other NextGen programs have faced widespread failures and cost increases, each of which typically causes ripple effects that delay other critical system updates.

Meanwhile, the FAA’s budget has nearly doubled to $16 billion between 1996 and 2012, only to see less productivity and higher costs, the IG previously reported.

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