AOPA Pilot Magazine - February 2018 - 97

COURTESY U.S. AIR FORCE

is installing the wiring. We've been working on that for the last year," Bunin said.
"Once we get the authorization and get the
physical parts, we'll be doing the upgrades
aggressively. We don't object to the mandate-we want to comply."
Beginning this summer, Southwest will
have 18 months to install nearly 1,400 new
transponders (each jet carries two). With
the wiring in place, that can be accomplished during an overnight layover, said
Bunin, who is confident the airline will
meet the 2020 deadline. The total cost to
the company will be in the hundreds of
millions of dollars. "I fly a Cessna 172-it's
a Hawk XP," he said. "The first transponder on the jet, alone, costs more than my
whole airplane. And there's two of them."
Ankit Nanda, director of engineering
for Allegiant Air, presented a similar perspective at Avionics magazine's Avionics for
NextGen conference in Herndon, Virginia,
in November. Allegiant has a mixed fleet
and although it's been discussing ADS-B
for a couple of years, even for its Airbus
jets there is not a universal equipage solution, he said. Another challenge is making
ADS-B seamless to pilots, and training
implications also must be considered.
"We're trying to figure out what ADS-B
brings to us from a flight operations perspective," Nanda said. "We're looking at
what benefits we can implement sooner
rather than later." Opportunities such as
optimized flight profiles and fuel-efficient
routings all have training implications.
Allegiant plans to retire its McDonnell
Douglas MD-80 jets before 2020. "Part of
[that decision] is the cost it would take to
make them 2020-compliant," Nanda said.
The company also has a diverse fleet of
Airbus A319 and A320 jets that have two
different equipment requirements. "On
the Airbus side of things, for some reason,
there is not a lot of equipment available out
there. It's a very tight timeline."
While the larger group awaits approval
of an STC, a solution identified for the
other Airbuses was too costly. "When two
aircraft are going to cost the same as the
rest of my fleet, that's not an acceptable
solution," said Nanda, who discovered that
he could pair a GPS receiver with ADS-B
Out transponders. The aircraft with older

TEXTRON AVIATION is adding ADS-B to 255 U.S. Navy and Army T-6 Texan II trainers, at

a cost of $31,373 per aircraft. The price includes updates to flight management system
software, as well as to ground-based training systems.

avionics will be his first two equipped.
The Department of Defense is not
exempt from the ADS-B Out mandate, U.S.
Air Force Capt. Devin Borden, a NextGen
analyst, said at Avionics for NextGen.
"However, it is well known that DoD will
be late to the party," he said, adding the
military will need airspace access and is
working with the FAA to facilitate that.
"We've known about this since 2010
and we still have issues with equipping,"
Borden said. One concern involves the
security of some ADS-B data. "We don't
want that seen by the public or bad actors,"
he explained. And the military is transitioning to a new military- or M-code GPS
receiver designed to improve positioning,
timing, and security; an interim transition
to an ADS-B-compliant position source
would be very expensive. But M-code
keeps getting pushed back, with deployment currently scheduled in 2021.
"We're not fighting NextGen," Borden
said. "We're working diligently with the
FAA to not disrupt the [National Airspace
System]."
And the military is beginning to equip.
Textron Aviation in Wichita recently
received an $8 million contract to add ADS-B

to 255 U.S. Navy and Army T-6 Texan II
turboprop trainers-that's $31,373 per aircraft. The project requires replacing the
Mode S transponder and GPS antenna, and
upgrading the GPS receiver in the aircraft's
integrated avionics computer with a new
Space Based Augmentation System (SBAS)/
WAAS receiver. Textron also will update the
T-6 flight management system software and
the aircraft's ground-based training system.
In early December, Global Aviation
Technologies in Wichita received the
first of 19 C-21A jets-military Learjet
35As delivered in 1984 and 1985-that it
is updating with ADS-B, glass panels, and
controller-pilot data link communications.
The $32.2 million contract-about $1.7 million per jet-does far more than meet the
ADS-B mandate, and acknowledges the
benefits of bundling ADS-B with other avionics upgrades.
AOPA
EMAIL mike.collins@aopa.org

WEB

See AOPA's online ADS-B resources (www.
aopa.org/adsb) and ADS-B selection tool
(www.aopa.org/adsbselector).

www.aopa.org/pilot AOPA PILOT | 97
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AOPA Pilot Magazine - February 2018

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