In aviation we appear to be creating abbreviations at an interest rate that raises the specter of our grandchildren not having any functional combinations left any more. That comment from a properly respectable colleague of mine who used to work for UPS airlines does in reality indicate a couple of issues that go beyond the scarcity of accessible unique letter mixtures and which, as we will have, influence our everyday perform in all kinds of unexpected ways.
Consider the well-known CNS formation which, all of us know, stands for Communications, Navigation and Surveillance. Whoever developed the abbreviation CNS probably had no strategy how much injury their technology might trigger in air traffic management by perpetuating the sort of silo mentality that keeps many businesses hopelessly split and some experts retreating to their respective ivory towers.
If at the very least the inventors had the good sense of putting these letters into some type of logical order, like history, which would have given us NCS... We did navigate first (as in looking for our way by studying the titles of teach programs and flying along highways), then proclaimed, originally with lights and hand signs and later via radio and lately we do detective also. Not that NCS would have been any better at driving the silo thinking from the facial skin of the earth.
Needless to say in the past there clearly was some logic in taking a look at navigating DA PBN Booster Package and interacting as anything completely different from each other. You qualified for one or another, aircraft carried split navigators and radio operators and when radar came along, the wizards of this set were a completely new breed however again. It was only reasonable also that separate fiefdoms should develop across the words NCS with almost no horizontal contact between them. That they should fiercely defend their particular domains was perfectly natural...
Let's now jump forward a few years to reach in our own daring occasions wherever CNS still rules, the fiefdoms are generally there still... OK, therefore where's the problem? The issue is, as the CNS organization slept primarily exactly the same, the planet around it's completely changed. Considering air traffic management along a CNS firm is much like hanging the TGV (High Pace Train) behind a steam locomotive and thinking why there is therefore much smoking with the prepare just moving along.
Search at GPS. That intelligent program does only a few things: it offers you specific time and signals from which you may calculate a position fix. What letter of the magic group could you spend to that particular? We transmitted augmentation signals to the airplane to make the GPS place fix even more appropriate, employing a VHF digital link... Is that C or D or S??? Ultimately, the aircraft may broadcast their GPS derived position for different airplane and the floor to use within a number of ways. Well, at least that is distinct, we're speaking about S for security, right? Partly sure but a situation may be, and is being, used for a great many other applications that fall way outside the standard definition of surveillance.
Our earth has evolved in to a data centered enterprise and air traffic administration is not any exception. In the GPS example, ostensibly exactly the same data will be applied and re-used and it is the end-user programs that determine whether it ends up being part of navigation or surveillance... or communications for that matter. The air traffic management earth is not about communications, navigation and surveillance. It is approximately information that may be the famous D or N or S without the need, or certainly the possibility, to erect silos about it.
moiz