Status and Forecast of Avionics Evolution

The coverage of U.S. aircraft fleet composition and avionics-enabled capabilities serves to inform FAA, operators, and industry on fleet evolution toward NextGen. It offers key findings, operator and industry feedback and plans, plus issues and challenges impacting NextGen fleet readiness. It includes current trends in equipage and forecasts of future aircraft avionics capabilities in the commercial Air Transport fleet that can be used to inform Air Traffic Infrastructure planning under the FAA’s NextGen program. The data contained in this report was accumulated while aviation and other industries are still recovering from impacts from the Coronavirus Disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The full extent of the impacts of COVID-19, along with other fleet impacts such as the current pilot shortages and geo-political instabilities on aviation, are not yet known.

The MITRE Corporation’s (MITRE) Center for Advanced Aviation System Development will continue to track changes that result from the pandemic and other significant impacts on the civil aircraft fleet, operators, and NextGen avionics equipage. Due to the diversity of and rate of change in the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic seen within the various fleets operating in the National Airspace System, MITRE’s confidence in the forecasts and projections offered in this edition of the report is necessarily somewhat lower than for the pre-pandemic editions of this product, but these forecasts and projections remain both relevant and usable for planning and assessment purposes. MITRE maintains a wide range of additional information on fleet and avionics evolution that is outside the scope of this report but may be available upon request.

Authors: Sean McCourt, Art Branch, Sam Cheng, Andrew Duesterhaus, Dale Goodrich, Melwyn Pereira, Jenipher Scott, Steve Spooner, Todd Stock, David Strand,