FAA names Center of Excellence for General Aviation
October 1, 2012, 01:28 pm
The Federal Aviation Administration recently announced that it has selected a team of universities to lead the Air Transportation Center of Excellence for general aviation, focusing on research and testing to improve safety and sustainability for the general aviation community.
The first Center of Excellence for General Aviation was established in 2001 with a 10-year agreement to conduct research on airport and aircraft safety. With the conclusion of that contract, researching pilot training, human factors, weather, Automatic Dependent Surveillance/Broadcast (ADS-B), remote airport lighting systems and other matters, the FAA has assembled a new team for the next 10 years.
“The United States has the largest and most diverse general aviation community in the world, with more than 300,000 aircraft registered to fly through American skies,” said Ray LaHood, U.S. Transportation Department secretary. “This innovative partnership with academia and industry will help us take general aviation safety to the next level.”
The center, which is known as the FAA Center of Excellence Partnership to Enhance General Aviation Safety, Accessibility and Sustainability, will be led by Purdue University, Ohio State University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. The team will focus on a wide range of general aviation research and development efforts pertaining to aviation safety which include airport technology, propulsion and structures, airworthiness, flight safety, fire safety, human factors, system safety management and weather.
“The FAA continues its goal of working to reduce general aviation fatalities by 10 percent over a 10-year period, from 2009 to 2018,” said Michael Huerta, acting FAA administrator. “The Center of Excellence program is a valuable tool in providing the critical data we need to reduce those accidents.”
The FAA plans to invest a minimum of $500,000 in PEGASAS during the first five years of the new 10-year agreement.
In other recent aviation news, Harris Corp. recently announced that it has been awarded a contract worth $63 million to supply the FAA with enterprise messaging services.
The contract is in place to distribute enterprise data sharing that is needed for the Next Generation Air Transportation. NextGen is the largest aviation investment in U.S. history and will help air traffic controllers handle more airplanes, with plans to reduce airline traffic by as much as 10 percent. With air traffic expected to double in the next two decades, the new Harris Corp. contract will help establish technology for a variety of data, including flight planning, traffic flow management, surface radar and weather information.
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