The FAA is moving forward with a $16.5 million program to install Vehicle Movement Area Transmitters on its airport vehicles, the agency announced Wednesday. The equipment will be used on about 1,900 FAA vehicles at 44 airports with ASDE-X and ASSC surface surveillance systems, along with 220 airports that have or are expected to receive Surface Awareness Initiative systems. The FAA said the funding comes from the One Big Beautiful Bill.
“Vehicle Movement Area Transmitters (VMATs) help prevent dangerous runway incidents and by accelerating the deployment of this technology, we’re closing critical visibility gaps on our nation’s runways and taxiways,” FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said. “This initiative is yet another example of our commitment to proactive safety improvements and strong collaboration across the aviation community.”
VMATs allow equipped airport vehicles to appear on controllers’ displays with identifying information and call signs. Vehicles without the transmitters appear only as unidentified blue diamonds. The agency said airports can use federal grant funding to equip their own vehicles and recommended that airports encourage airlines and other airfield operators to do the same. More than 50 airports have expressed interest in the equipment, according to the FAA.
The agency said it had been planning the program for several months and accelerated it following a March 22 accident at New York’s LaGuardia Airport in which an Air Canada jet struck an unequipped Aircraft Rescue and Firefighting vehicle after landing.
So they have a ground tracking system for vehicles with transponders… but never equipped the vehicles with transponders?! 17M$. SEVENTEEN MIL! This is a rounding error even to the FAA.
It cost two Canadians their lives, another crippled for life, to move these idiot bureaucrats & politicians off the mark. I sincerely hope they are all haunted by their lack of action.
At least one, City, Chicago, already did this years ago. It’s been very successful.
It is important to design systems for the way people are, not for what we what we want them to be!
Countless lives and injury have attested to this over millenia.