Inspector general's report says the FAA has bungled a $36 billion project

[Eugene]

Source: Washington Post

By Ashley Halsey III March 8 at 3:23 PM

The Federal Aviation Administration has mishandled a $36 billion project to modernize the antiquated aviation management system, according to a harshly critical inspector general’s report released Thursday.

It was the fourth inspector general’s critique in as many years of a program known as NextGen, on which more than $7 billion in federal funds has already been spent.

This latest report says the FAA lacks “a clearly established framework for managing the overall oversight of NextGen.”

Much of the 50-page report — done for the House Appropriations Committee and prepared by Matthew E. Hampton, assistant inspector general for aviation audits — focuses on specific examples of program mismanagement.

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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/inspector-generals-report-says-the-faa-has-bungled-a-36-billion-project/2018/03/08/5436c6ba-22f6-11e8-badd-7c9f29a55815_story.html

[bluevoter4life]

1. I work for the FAA

And I firmly believe, 100%, that this is true. The agency is notorious for mismanaging even the simplest of tasks. But, as I suspected was the case before reading the article, this sounds like a backhanded attempt to reintroduce privatization of the Agency after Schuster pulled the bill. You want to see mismanagement, just wait until it's in the hands of the airlines.

[pangaia]

3. ++++++++++++

[DeminPennswoods]

6. Everyone thinks because a report is from the IG

it's an independent assessment. It's not always. I've seen my share with what were, imo, designed to produce predetermined findings and recommendations.

My command went through several of these big, complicated projects to switch from an older system to a new one. Unfortunately the statements of work, the contracts, the funding and the overall philosophy is at the mercy of new administrations, congresses and the appropriations bills. These projects can really get whipsawed around. It's rarely a straight path from here to there because you can't just shut down an agency for months to upgrade and install a new system.

[SergeStorms]

2. Without reading the article I'm going to hazard a guess.

No bid contracts to seriously unqualified vendors?

I'll come back and read the article later, just so I see how I did.

[sandensea]

4. 'Bungled', of course, is DC-speak for embezzled.

It sounds a lot more innocuous, and is shorter besides.

[lapfog_1]

5. I once sat on an evaluation board

for a $500M contract to create a number of information repositories for Earth Science ( Climate ) data. The contract was awarded by a NASA center ( Goddard ) while I worked for a different NASA center ( Ames ). A great deal of money was spent on software developed by one large government contractor. The software was way too complex, late, and didn't work. In the meantime, there wasn't even equipment purchased to store even the initial amount of data from a couple of satellite platforms ( also built by the same contractor ), and so those satellites were stored in "clean rooms" instead of being launched into space... because they didn't know where to put the data.

The clean room storage of those remote sensing satellites was costing NASA millions of dollars per MONTH.

I had built a very large storage system at Ames for simulation data ( mostly CFD data generated by our collection of HPC systems ).

Most of the $500M had been spent already... my system cost the government around $20M for both the equipment and the software ( which my team wrote since there wasn't any commercial off the shelf software to transparently store Petabytes of data at that time ).

I could not believe the amount of waste, "fraud", and abuse that went on ( I have to put "fraud" in quotes because there was never a finding of actual fraud against the prime contractor for the Goddard system ).

Even though this was over 20 years ago now, it still infuriates how badly that contract was run.

We ended up storing the data at Ames (with duplicates of the data at Goddard - but cold stored it meaning that the data could only be retrieved online from Ames) for a fraction of the cost.

What we did was create two copies of every tape we created and once a week FedEx'd (or UPS, I don't remember now) the copies to be stored off site in case of disaster. I was famous (well, within the HPC storage community) for creating a quote "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 full of 50GB tapes" (instead of spending millions on the wide area network bandwidth between Ames and Goddard).

That the FAA spent billions on yet another modernization program that fell apart is not surprising. Contractors who bid on these things rarely face any real consequences for failure. OTOH, it's not like there are existing systems that one can order up over Amazon or buy at the local software store. I'm sure the new system would have included updates to the nation wide network of radar and transponder tracking equipment as well as AI software to automate the handling of thousands of airplanes at airports as well as in the sky. But still. $36B is a *lot* of money (the entire annual NASA budget when I worked there was only $12B, including all of the shuttle flights, the ISS, MTPE, our support of aircraft design, thousands of employees, everything).

[DeminPennswoods]

7. Thanks for posting this

Let me add that contractors who bid on these big projects always present the most optimistic estimates for when things will be done and how much they will cost.

The federal govt has plenty of smart, talented employees who could do the same work faster and better than most contractors, but, of course, that doesn't fit with the preferred narrative that federal civil servants are dumb and lazy.