FAA AAS

  • $4B program to replace FAA air traffic control system hardware and software tower, terminal and enroute facilities; 2M SLOC Ada on distributed IBM RS/6000

    • - In 1994 the program was restructured: terminal part cancelled; tower part descoped; enroute part became Display Replacement System (DSR)

  • “The Role of Ada in the Restructuring of the Advanced Automation System Program”

    • - Abstract of paper by Jonathan Dehn and Michael Glasgow, Loral Air Traffic Control

  • “Root problems in the AAS”

    • - “Inadequate requirements baseline control”
    - “Extremely high availability requirements that led to high complexity in the implementation”
    - “Changing mission needs”

  • “[Ada] had little to do with the problems that caused the restructuring of the program.”

    • - Note: beneficial aspects of Ada use not yet addressed in the draft paper
    - “Shortage of truly knowledgable Ada programmers. . .”
    - “Ada is frequently maligned for being a poor [execution] performer . . . We reject this notion.”
    - “Resource intensive in the development environment”
    - “Ada suffers from a severe image problem . . . viewed as a dead-end language”

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From the Script: SLIDE 45 - FAA AAS

The largest avionics effort ever written in Ada is the US Federal Aviation Agency's project to modernize its air traffic control system. IBM won the contract for developing 2.3 million lines of new code for the Advanced Automation System (AAS) portion. About 1.8 million lines of code will be written in Ada.

In 1994, the program was restructured. The terminal portion was canceled; the tower portion reduced in scope; the enroute portion became the Display Replacement System (DRS).

It should be noted that Ada had little to do with the problems that caused the restructuring of the program. Major causes for the restructuring were inadequate control of baseline requirements, extremely high availability requirements, and changing mission needs.

All of the information on this slide can be found in the paper, "The Role of Ada in the Restructuring of the AAS" by Jonathan Dehn and Michael Glasgow of Loral Air Traffic Control (formerly IBM).