Contributions to NextGen
Deborah Kirkman
February 2010
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Deborah Kirkman |
When Debby Kirkman first came to MITRE in 1984, she was looking for a challenging work environment in a family-friendly company. More than two decades later she's still here and feeling satisfied with her role supporting the Federal Aviation Administration's efforts to implement the Next Generation Air Transportation System, a large-scale multi-year program also called NextGen.
Kirkman is an information systems engineer in MITRE's Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD), which serves as the federally funded research and development center for the FAA. She has spent most of her career working on different areas of the nation's air traffic transportation system. In the 1980s, she supported projects such as the development of aviation weather system requirements and requirements for air traffic control digital communication systems.
By the 1990s, she had worked in a wide range of projects and was interacting with the broader aviation community on air traffic control modernization issues through RTCA, which serves as an advisory committee to the FAA. Her projects included implementing digital communications, coordinating automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) efforts, and supporting the Free Flight modernization effort. Her extensive background in both developing and implementing air traffic modernization led to her involvement in NextGen.
Helping Shape the Future of Air Transportation
One of Kirkman's most significant contributions to NextGen was made through serving as part of the leadership of the RTCA Mid-Term Implementation Task Force, where she was a co-chair for one of its sub-groups. The task force began in February 2009 and published its final report in September. "The task force was truly a community effort," she says. "We conducted more than 150 meetings with hundreds of individuals from every part of the aviation community."
She continues, "My specific role on the task force was to look at all the NextGen initiatives as a portfolio—understanding how all the different pieces work together and how to make sure we are focusing on the most important pieces first. The task force was trying to develop a repeatable, transparent way of characterizing all the potential initiatives. Our cross-industry team developed a set of metrics and our MITRE team members developed a visualization tool that allowed task force participants to navigate through all of the data that was collected on each initiative. We wanted to identify the benefits, the stakeholders, implementation readiness, and risks to achieving each initiative. We wanted everyone to understand what those assessment criteria were and to have some level of confidence in the validity of those assessments."
Seven months later the task force reached an industry consensus on the priorities for transitioning the current national air transportation system to NextGen over the next decade. The group published a report of its findings and included recommendations for the entire aviation community that itemized incremental improvements in capacity, efficiency, and access. This format allows the FAA to make improvements to the air transportation system now—using existing equipment—while providing a roadmap for future improvements as equipment and technology upgrades are made.
Kirkman's work on NextGen has been personally rewarding. "I learned a tremendous amount by being part of CAASD and supporting NextGen," she says. "One thing that I have really come to appreciate is the rich diversity of the operational uses for air transportation. There are so many different aircraft operators besides the airlines, and they all have different objectives, needs, and approaches.
"Moving forward with NextGen when everyone in the aviation community has to play a part is really a tremendous challenge in terms of multi-stakeholder decision making. Everyone has something different that they care about. The question is: How do you balance all those different objectives and get people to agree to a common path?"
The Secret of Her Success
Kirkman admits that many factors have influenced her career at MITRE. "There are two main things that I've always found to be tremendously satisfying about MITRE. First, I am constantly learning. Second, I have a chance to make a difference by working in the public interest.
"In addition, when my children were young, working at MITRE allowed me a good balance between what I wanted to do as a caretaker for my children versus my technical career," she says. "I worked part-time for 14 years and still had opportunities for very good assignments and promotions. That's a great thing—the ability to work at a company that is so family-friendly is really important to me."
Her work here has had other benefits. "Since flying is directly applicable to our interactions with the aviation community, I was able to get a pilot's license using MITRE's education benefits. In addition to helping me understand the aviation community better, for several years I actively flew and did Angel Flight volunteer work transporting medical patients, which I also found very gratifying."
—by Kay M. Upham
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