Privately designed RNP procedure spreads its wings

An American Airlines B-737-800 on 26 August became the first passenger aircraft in the US to make use of public performance-based navigation (PBN) procedures developed independently of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

The Required Navigation Performance (RNP) approach was carried out at Bradley International Airport, in Connecticut, with an American Airlines flight from Dallas Fort Worth.

At Bradley, GE Aviation developed an RNP Authorisation Required approach (in ICAO parlance – the FAA defines it as Special Aircraft and Aircrew Authorization Required). Whereas previous approaches were designed for individual airlines by GE Aviation business unit Naverus, the RNP procedure at Bradley is open to any carrier's aircraft, provided it is equipped with the appropriate onboard avionics.

"American just happens to have a B-737-800 flight into Bradley, but because it's a public-use procedure anyone can fly it," said Steve Fulton, co-founder of Naverus and technical fellow at GE Aviation. Speaking to Jane's, he added: "We've always had a regulatory path to produce procedures for private use; now for the first time we have a procedure within the National Airspace System [NAS] that was developed for public use by an organisation other than the FAA."

The agency remains responsible for approving and auditing these public RNP procedures, but Fulton remarked that the objective is to free up resources within the FAA to meet the demands of NextGen. "As the NAS makes the transition with NextGen from the old to the new, we're looking at a situation where thousands of these procedures would be required. To accomplish that goal, it's going to take up a lot of resources," he said.