The Future Belongs to the Mobile
John Marburger, Director, Office of Science and Technology
Policy
Thank you for inviting me here today to
talk with you about the future of the aerospace industry. As you
know, I am the White House sponsor for your Commission, and Charlie Huettner
of my staff serves as your Executive Director. If there is anything
that we can do to help make your effort a success, please let us know.
The President strongly supports your effort.
The nation has depended on the aerospace industry for decades to ensure
that America leads the world in high technology, including the manufacturing
of military and commercial aircraft, satellites, space launch vehicles,
weapon systems and telecommunications systems. As a result, our military
is the best in the world, our economy has benefited from a positive aerospace
balance of trade, and our people and shippers have benefited from having
the best and safest aviation system in the world. The public has
also benefited from the numerous spin-offs from the aerospace industry,
including cellular telephones, precision farming, new medical devices,
improved weather forecasting, and hundreds of others.
The President wants to make sure that U.S.
aerospace leadership continues in the 21st Century. The critically
important tasks of this Commission are to help the President establish
the direction for the U.S. aerospace industry in this new century, and
to support national initiatives on education, defense, security, and energy.
This Commission is taking place at a landmark
period in our history. The events of September 11 require a national
response similar to that following the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957.
The President has clearly expressed our national determination that all
Americans, and indeed the world, will pursue their aspirations free from
the threat of global terrorism. The reprehensible terrorist assault
on two of our nation’s most important facilities have turned a dramatic
spotlight on weaknesses in our aerospace and air transportation systems.
Even prior to September 11th, however,
the United States faced serious challenges in these areas:
technology and management ideas – was approaching gridlock,
requirements on noise and emissions were limiting world-wide flight operations
and creating international conflict,
being challenged as an explicit goal of foreign competitors,
aeronautics and space research and development were shrinking rapidly,
threatening a crisis in the industry’s ability to attracting trained and
talented human capitol.
We must ensure that the disruption of transportation
and services that followed the events of September 11 does not recur.
We need to develop a 21st Century global air transportation system that
provides safe, secure, efficient and affordable transportation of people,
goods and information in peacetime and wartime – enabling people and goods
to move freely anywhere, anytime, on time. We need a system that:
strengthening homeland defense while enabling the military to project power
anywhere in the world at any time;
by building a more efficient, higher capacity air transportation system;
and
of all Americans by enabling them to do what they want to do when and where
they want to do it.
We also need to re-invigorate an innovative
aerospace industry that, with the appropriate incentives and investments,
can develop such a system and sustain U.S. leadership in the 21st Century.
It has never been clearer that our military’s
capability must be the best in the world. As we saw in the Persian
Gulf and Kosovo, and are seeing again today in Afghanistan, air superiority,
airborne reconnaissance, airborne weapon delivery, and airborne personnel
and logistics transport are crucial to our military’s success and national
security. But as the events of September 11 showed, the air defenses
within our nation are vulnerable to terrorist and other hostile actions.
We must now re-double our efforts to eliminate the potential for any part
of our aviation system being used as a threat to our homeland.
The nation’s civil aviation system must
also be the best in the world. Aviation is key to making the mobility
promise of America available to everyone and to moving high-value goods
quickly around the nation and the world. Productivity growth and
our gross domestic product are directly related to efficient and growing
air transportation.
Nevertheless, commercial air transport
is becoming less and less reliable, with frustrating and expensive delays.
The gridlock I mentioned earlier is a sign that the current system cannot
simply be scaled up to meet projected future growth, especially given the
additional measures required to enhance its security. Airports and
airplanes can have undesirable environmental side effects, such as noise
and air pollution. Travelers have growing safety concerns.
And although the events of September 11 have reduced the demand in civil
aviation, this downturn will only be temporary.
Any one of these issues alone would be
cause for serious concern. Taken together – and we do not have the
choice to ignore any one of them – they call for immediate and bold action.
It is now clear that for too long, we have
put off the development of policies, systems and technologies needed to
solve these challenges. For too long, we have lacked the national
leadership necessary to make these investments and guide them through to
application.
We can wait no longer.
Improvements in homeland defense, national
defense and civil aviation require the same core suite of technologies.
We can enhance security while creating greater mobility for America.
This is what this Administration wants and what our country needs.
Today, I call for this Commission to
help the President and the Congress define the steps necessary to develop
a new air transportation system, a system that will not only enhance our
national security at home and abroad but simultaneously provide a civil
aviation system that will enable a new era of mobility for all our citizens,
new business opportunities for our most imaginative entrepreneurs, and
greater productivity for the entire nation.
The necessity of this call to action is
clear to see. But the strategy and design for its implementation
is surely complex and needs the thoughtful analysis of this able Commission.
I offer three strategic developments that
I believe are necessary.
1 – We need national
leadership to develop an integrated global air transportation system that
simultaneously meets our national defense, homeland security and civil
aviation requirements. Today, that leadership is dispersed among
many agencies and organizations that properly deal with the aviation community.
In the Federal government, this includes the Department of Transportation’s
Federal Aviation Administration, NASA, and the Departments of Defense,
Commerce, and State. Often these departments and agencies deal with
aviation-related issues independently, without prior coordination, and
sometimes at cross-purposes to each other. All have separate authorizing
and appropriating Congressional Committees. State and local governments
also play important aviation development roles and private industry has
numerous near-term competing forces that often prevent longer-term solutions
in the national interest.
We need strong leadership to understand
these competing concerns, and then intelligently and decisively move ahead.
I call upon the Commission to assess these needs and responsibilities and
suggest how this National leadership might best be created.
2 -The core of an integrated
21st Century transportation system will be a common infrastructure of communications,
navigation, and surveillance system design and operation. The aviation
system needs an infrastructure that is secure and allows all classes of
aircraft, from airlines to unpiloted vehicles to operate safely, securely,
and efficiently from thousands of communities based on market size and
demand. It also needs to be able to operate within a national air
defense system and enable military and commercial aircraft to operate around
the world in peacetime and in war.
The communications, navigation and surveillance
system that the civil aviation system uses today is not much different
from that used in the 1960’s – ground based radar tracking, a reliance
on voice radios, and overburdened air traffic controllers guiding growing
numbers of individual aircraft throughout their flights. Not only
does this system design not take advantage of new technological capabilities
to increase its capacity, reliability, and efficiency, it is reaching its
inherent scalability limits.
We should be harnessing key technologies
being developed by the Department of Defense, NASA, and private industry
to enhance our homeland defense and civil aviation system. This includes
high bandwidth satellite voice and data communications, precision navigation
with GPS and necessary back-ups, global surveillance that continuously
tracks both present aircraft position and updates a conflict-free flight
path, technologies to vastly improve our short-term (2-6 hour) weather
forecasts, digital terrain and airport data bases that create clear-day
safety and efficiencies in any visibility condition, and new air transportation
management systems that use the power of information technology to move
vehicles with unprecedented efficiency, guaranteed safety, and immediate
recognition of unauthorized deviations.
I call upon the Commission to provide those
organizational and technology investment strategies that will enable the
development of this next-generation core capability.
3. Finally, we
need to create new management approaches and development processes in aerospace
that foster and reward continuous innovation by industry, government, and
academia. How can we re-invigorate the aerospace risk/reward payoff
from the view of Wall Street? What incentives can we provide to the
Department of Defense, FAA, NASA, and industry to cooperate to aggressively
develop and implement new technologies? How can we attract a new
generation of engineering students to the aerospace field? Our current
systems and practices are out of date and need to be revamped.
I challenge the Commission to identify
what changes are needed to best create a climate of innovation for aviation’s
future.
History has shown the power of a mobile
society. Early in our history, President Jefferson opened our frontiers
for a growing population to move westward by foot and wagon train.
President Lincoln brought west and east closer together for transport and
trade with the transcontinental railroad. President Eisenhower foresaw
the emerging needs and vast future benefits of an interstate highway system
linking the entire nation for automobile and truck transport and national
defense. Rapid travel through the air has been the latest opportunity
to efficiently link the country – and the world – together.
My vision, proven by history, is this:
The Future Belongs to the Mobile.
We need to unshackle our current air transportation
system to allow America to lead that future.
It is rare that such a landmark opportunity
for effective government action presents itself. Now we have
an opportunity to
- Improve our nation’s security
- Improve aviation security while addressing
long-standing technical and organizational challenges restricting today’s
aviation operations - Provide not only a short term economic
stimulus in a time of stagnating national economic growth, but a long term
investment in the high value technologies and systems needed to expand
the reliability, efficiency, and capacity of air transportation – a crucial
pathway to national productivity increases. - Support a critical sector of the economy
hit by job losses and sales reductions - Revitalize research and development
in technologies that have historically provided spin-off applications and
benefits to many other industries
I call upon the Commission to exert
itself to identify strategies that will successfully address the Nation’s
interests. I pledge my support in this tremendously exciting and
important endeavor.
Thank you.
