<p>4.2.1.1 Federal Aviation Administration – Stan Pszczolkowski, FAA Technical Center</p><p>The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has 3 Runway Safety Initiatives underway – Runway Status Lights, contact award is imminent; Low Cost Ground Surveillance Systems, soliciting industry proposals; and Electronic Flight Bag, a cooperative effort with several airlines at a number of airports. This last includes a moving map and a display of own-ship position.</p><p>The Federal Aviation Administration and the FAA Technical Center both celebrated their 50th anniversaries in the summer of 2008. To commemorate this event, the FAA DC-3 appeared at several air shows. This aircraft, built in 1945, was used as a flight inspection aircraft by the FAA from 1958 through 1981. It is one of two movable items on the National Register of Historical Places. (The other is San Francisco's cable cars.) </p><p>The FAA’s Air Traffic Organization (ATO) published a 5 year Strategic Plan and reorganized to provide a better balance of an operational and a strategic focus. The Joint Planning and Development Office (JPDO) (www.jpdo.aero) published an Integrated Work Plan (IWP) for the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen). (The JPDO now reports to the Senior Vice President for NextGen and Operations Planning in the ATO.) The IWP includes plans and analyses of the nine principal functional areas and draft capabilities to be enabled by these functions. The FAA has published the “NextGen Implementation Plan” (www.faa.gov/nextgen). It includes accomplishments, planned demonstrations, a mid-term (2012-2018) system description, necessary infrastructure components, upcoming critical architecture decisions and descriptions of the three domains – Aircraft and Operator Requirements, Airport, and Air Traffic Operations.</p><p>The FAA will conduct a demonstration of the Local Area Augmentation System (LAAS) at Newark Liberty Airport. This demo is being done in collaboration with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Continental Airlines, Honeywell and Boeing. If this demo is successful, LAAS could enter operational service. It would reduce airspace congestion, provide more operational flexibility (e.g. precision curved path approaches), reduced airspace separation between adjacent airports, and better utilization of closely spaced parallel runways. </p>