Harnessing GIS Data

Sept. 5, 2014

Michael T. McNerney, assistant manager for FAA's airport engineering division, joined the agency last October primarily to run the airports GIS (geographic information systems) program; he has also worked on advisory circulars related to aiport GIS.

McNerney was recently awarded the Robert Horonjeff Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers. The award is given out for contributions to advancing the field of air transportation engineering. 

Comments McNerny, "We'd like airports to do an airport layout plan every five years; the purpose of the layout plan is two-fold: the FAA can’t protect the airspace or existing and future runways unless we have a plan that shows where they are going to be; once we approve that plan we can improve the airspace and the areas around it, and prevent towers from being built at the ends of future runways for example.

That requires a lot of coordination among different offices, he adds. A typical ALP (aiprort layout plan) approval takes some three months of coordination among a variety of offices and lines of business within FAA.

"We are now going digital, both in our data collection, and with geospatial information, meaning it has a GIS capability, where we can measure spacial differences," says McNerney.

Traditionally this is done with planning grants; the airports GIS program is going to be the central authoritative source database for both pilot information and airport information, he explains.

Benefits

"We think that by going digital, we are going to save billions of dollars over the life of the program," says McNerney. "What’s happening now is, airports are doing these surveys multiple times but the data isn’t saved from one survey to another. Now it’s saved with an authoritative source - the data is verified and approved, and it’s in a location that is easily accessible via the Internet."

The agency believes digital is the best way to save data, relates McNerney.

The cost is the hangup for some airports, he says. "We are collecting a lot of data on larger airports and that’s where the emphasis is right now.

"When we get to the smaller airports, we may be able to ‘rightsize’ the data collection, so we don’t have to collect as much and it won’t cost as much. But, it’s going to take awhile to accumulate the data ... there’s 503 commercial service airports, and we’ve got 3,300 airports that get federal assistance.

Advisory Circulars

There are currently three FAA advirsory circulars (ACs) that describe the system and outline standards for collecting aeronautical and survey data using GIS:

5300-16: Requires the geodetic survey- If an aiport is not installing new primary or secondary control points on the airport (survey points that tie into the national reference system), then it doesn't have to put this plan in place.

5300-17: Relates to guidance on how to conduct aerial photography, and what the limits are. Once that is done, we extract the GIS data from the photography, and that’s what

5300-18: Provides specifications for the collection of airport data through feild and office methodologies in support of FAA; also explains how to submit the data.

All three of the ACs are currently in revision, relates McNerney, who says FAA plans to have at least two of them out this fiscal year.

With regard to data accuracy, remarks McNerney, "When this surveying first came out, the surveyors didn’t understand that they had to tie the data into the national geodetic system, because the normal land development surveyor just ties it into local points ... but it has to be tied into the national reference system.

"So, it’s much more accurate this way, and again, it’s verified. That’s a very important part of the process.

"Obviously we think that airports will benefit, as well as FAA. Instead of taking three months to approve an ALP, approval will become much easier because everyone will be looking at the same digital data and the same time."

And there is a NextGen component to this, says McNerney. "Someone here coined the phrase, 'the airports GIS is the unsung NextGen enabler,' because we give the data that NextGen has to have for the program to be implemented.

"We maintain, if someone has to collect this data on the airports, it’s better the airports do it rather than the air traffic people; that’s why we’re doing it this way."

According to McNerney, FAA has been giving training to consultants on how to use its website; consultants have to submit all their data to FAA via the Web, and more than 1,500 people have signed up for the training so far.

More information on FAA's airports GIS website and IDLE (Integrated Distance Learning Environment) platform can be found at https://aiports-gis.faa.gov/aiprortsgis. FAA also maintains a 24-hour helpdesk for consultants.

AAAE's SAAMS

Greg Mamary, AAAE's special projects manager, runs the association's annual airports GIS conference. He became involved with AAAE's SAAMS (Spatial Airport Asset Management System) platform by default due to his connection with the conference. 

"Airports are using SAAMS in a ton of different ways, but some of the most common uses are related to asset management, which is how SAAMS got its name," explains Mamary.

"Some airports use GIS to manage leases, and for locating and identifying utilities. When you select certain things on a digital GIS map, there is metadata [data about the data] attached to certain points." With this information, airports have access to critical information about individual assets on the airport setting, he adds.

FAA's recent ACs related to airport GIS kind of drove the development of SAAMS, relates Mamary.

"SAAMS isn’t so much teaching people how to use GIS, but what it does is gives them a platform with GIS data to play with," he says. Airports simply have to send the same GIS data they are required to send FAA to the SAAMS platform.

With SAAMS, "You can actually do things like draw a polygon around a grassy area between taxiways, and in seconds it will give you the square footage ... so if I’m ordering fertilizer, I’ll have a better idea of what I need, for example."

"There’s an aircraft layout tool where instantaneously, you can put almost any aircraft, to scale, onto your ramp to see how it’s going to fit. It really gives airports the ability to play around with the information that they’ve sent to FAA."

SAAMS has nothing to do with data collection or verification, but it’s a platform to put information into, and airports can get different information out of it, says Mamary.

"We are just rolling this out; so far it’s been the small airports that are most interested in the platform," he relates.

In terms of cost, every airport pays a base fee, and on top of that, AAAE adds on a small percentage of annual aircraft movements - 10 percent is added on for commercial service airports, and 5 percent for general aviation airports.

"Even for a large airport, the service is a fraction of the cost of building and maintaining an in-house GIS system; the trade-off is that SAAMS is not customized for a particular airport setting."

More information on SAAMS can be found on the Web at: saams.aaae.org/index.cfm.