Kathryn is Clueless Too

I am really starting to wonder how all this works. How does someone that is obviously smart (like Kathryn Wylde) become so misinformed ? Who is she talking to ? What are they telling her ? And how do they convince her to embarrass herself so publicly ?

Kathryn Wylde is President & CEO of the nonprofit Partnership for New York City, the city’s business leadership organization....

An internationally known expert in housing, economic development and urban policy, Wylde serves on a number of boards and advisory groups, ...

From her bio it’s obvious she has no aviation experience -- much less air traffic control experience. So where does she get the conviction to write such a forceful (if clueless) opinion piece ? If someone asked me to write an opinion piece on housing for The Huffington Post I’d have to pass. I don’t know anything about it. Why does Ms. Wylde write one about aviation transportation -- when it’s obvious she doesn’t know anything about it ?

”NextGen is the solution. Using it, pilots will no longer have to fly indirect routes in order to remain within an airport's radar range.”

That’s wrong on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to start. We don’t use airport radars (they are known as Airport Surveillance Radars) to track aircraft enroute -- we use Air Route Surveillance Radars. And the placement of those radars has virtually nothing to do with “indirect routes”.

”The problem is that the FAA plans to slowly roll-out this technology at small, low-capacity airports to make sure the technology works properly, even though it has existed for a decade and is being used around the world...

But we need a Broadway debut. NextGen, which will replace old-fashioned air traffic control radar systems with a satellite-based technology similar to a car's GPS, should be implemented as soon as possible at America's busiest airports - those in the New York Tri-state metropolitan area.“

Oh yeah. We don’t need to turn Frankenstein loose in the country to see if he’s going to go berserk. Let’s turn him loose in Times Square and see how that works out.

Lord help. I’m going back to tending my flowers.

Don Brown
June 30, 2009