Environmental
- Reduced Noise Emissions: Through quieter engines and procedures like Optimized Profile Descents (OPD), the number of people impacted by noise has been reduced to fewer than 500,000.
- Reduced Carbon Dioxide: NextGen will reduce carbon emissions by 14 million tons by 2020.
- Reduced Fuel Consumption: NextGen will reduce fuel consumption by 1.4 billion gallons by 2020.
- Continuous Lower Energy Emissions and Noise (CLEEN): Program provides incentives for manufacturers to develop lower-noise aircraft.
Safety
- Expected to reduce accident and incident rates.
- Operational: Better visual/verbal communication; Improved situational awareness; Precision navigation; Improved rescue efforts in remote areas.
- Enhanced Workload: Through automation and communication systems, pilots and Air Traffic Control (ATC) will have reduced voice interaction. Automation systems with conflict probing will reduce the need for ATC to manually identify conflicts.
- Safety Management System (SMS): Enables better safety management and data sharing. Extracts data from public and non-public data sources throughout the National Airspace System (NAS).
Economic
- Aviation adds $1.3 trillion to economic activity.
- Adds 10.2 million jobs.
- 5.2 percent GDP.
- NextGen will save $33 billion in mid-term (2007-2018).
- Reduced Delay: NextGen is expected to reduce delays by 35 percent by 2020.
- Increased Capacity: Radar-like separation procedures in remote or non-radar areas decreasing travel time; Support for common separation standards in all classes of aircraft; Improved ATC ability to plan arrivals and departures for aircraft far in advance.
- Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B): Provides surveillance and traffic situational awareness simultaneously to pilots and ATC; ADS-B is designed to improve safety, capacity, and efficiency in the NAS while providing a flexible, expandable platform to accommodate future air traffic growth; Also in Surveillance Broadcast Services.
