A Senior Associate with W M Associates from 1994 to the present, Siegbert B. Poritzky was previously responsible for aviation technical matters and airport operations for the Airports Council International - NA. He served as Senior Vice President, Technical Affairs.
Mr. Poritzky joined the Airport Operators Council International, ACI-NA's predecessor organization, in September 1987 after 11 years with the Federal Aviation Administration in Washington, D.C. He joined FAA in 1976 as Director of System Engineering Management, the office charged with assuring a coherent system improvement effort, coalescing the views of FAA and aviation users. He was responsible for requirements evaluation, system integration and advanced systems conceptual design and development. He led an FAA/aviation industry effort to develop New Engineering and Development Initiatives - Policy and Technology Choices. In 1978-80, his Office of System Engineering Management developed its research on air traffic control automation into the "AERA System Concept", a coherent approach to Automated Enroute Air Traffic Control, and laid the ground work for what later became FAA's efforts toward ATC automation and decision support systems.
He was a member of the FAA inner-circle team which developed the first National Airspace System Modernization Plan, and chaired FAA's Internal Management Steering Group on Airport Capacity Improvement and Delay Reduction. In connection with this work, he was the FAA lead, and later the industry lead in achieving important airport and terminal area capacity gains and operating analyses, including separation standards reductions and flow improvement.
In 1985, he led the group which developed FAA's Assessment of Satellite Concepts and Aviation Spectrum Requirements, and in 1980, led an FAA-wide
team to create An FAA Vision of the Communications, Navigation, and Surveillance (CNS) Services in the Future Air Traffic Control System.
Later he became FAA Director of System Studies and Cooperative Programs, dealing with domestic and international programs. He managed FAA
cooperative research and development efforts with several foreign countries.
Shortly after the failure of the original FAA/NASA AEROSAT program (an early program which proposed to establish aeronautical communications
satellites for oceanic use, but which was found to be too expensive and ambitious) and just after the development of the FAA modernization plan (called
the National Airspace System Plan), Mr. Poritzky led an informal effort to establish real requirements for new technology based on operational need as
opposed to technical possibility. He organized an informal Committee to Review the Application of Satellite and Other Techniques to Civil Aviation,
made up of representatives from twenty states and international organizations (including United Kingdom, U.S.S.R., Australia, IATA and ICAO) and led
the U.S. participation in the group. The foundation for the work was a contract study by SRI International directed by Mr. Poritzky. The results of the
informal committee became the basis for the ICAO formation of the formal Future Air Navigation Systems Committee (FANS) which developed the
well-known FANS concepts, now referred to as CNS/ATM.
Mr. Poritzky served as the United States member of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Council Special Committee on Future Air
Navigation Systems (FANS), and led U.S. preparatory activities and the U.S. delegations for FANS. The group, with the strong input from the U.S.
delegation, agreed on and defined the concepts now grouped as FANS or CNS ATM - including GNSS satellite navigation, an open competitive satellite
communications and data link architecture, the importance of a open architecture Aeronautical Communications Network (ATN) concept, the Required
Navigation Performance (RNP) concept, Automatic Dependent Surveillance (ADS), the importance of the airport and the airport surface as integral
parts of the ATC system, and critical importance of automation-supported wide-area- coordinated air traffic management (ATM) techniques to permit
aircraft to follow their optimum desired flight tracks with minimum artificial constraints.
As part of his work for the airports association, Mr. Poritzky served as the staff representative for the ACI-NA Technical Committee, a group of more
than 100 airport technical specialists responsible for major technical, planning, construction, environmental technology and maintenance functions at their
airports. The Committee and its three subcommittees - Planning, Design and Capacity Enhancement; Maintenance; and Airport-Related Research and
Development - dealt essentially with all airport technical matters and airport relations with the U.S. and Canadian governments.
In this role, Mr. Poritzky worked to assure airport understanding of the impact and beneficial potential of the FANS concepts on airport operations, and
to assure that airport needs were taken into account by government planners.
Earlier, he had participated, as a representative of airlines and later FAA, in many ICAO activities dealing with ATC, the standardization of DME,
all-weather landing, beaconry and automatic altitude reporting, airport technical matters, and over-ocean improvements. He led several U.S. delegations
to ICAO.
He has served on numerous industry and governmental bodies. He has served on NASA and Transportation Research Board (TRB) advisory
committees. He represented FAA on the DOT Small Business Innovative Research Council, and the FAA/NASA University Research Program. In 1979
he was a recipient of the Secretary of Transportation's Award for Meritorious Service.
He is a member of the Air Traffic Control Association, and was designated an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and
Astronautics, for which he has been an AIAA Distinguished Lecturer.
Prior to joining the FAA, at the Air Transport Association of America, Mr. Poritzky was Director of National Airspace System Engineering, and Special
Assistant to the Senior Vice-President. He was instrumental to the initiation of government/industry airport capacity task forces, and in the development
of uniform, coherent airport capacity and delay analytical models. Prior to ATA, he worked as an engineer for Trans World Airlines, for McDonnell
Aircraft Corporation, for FAA's predecessor agency (CAA) and for ARINC (then Aeronautical Radio, Inc.). At ARINC he served in the industry affairs
group, as Secretary of the Airlines Electronic Engineering Committee (AEEC).
He has served as a member of the Board of Directors of RTCA, the aviation technical concepts, requirements and standards development body. In earlier
years he was active in many activities of RTCA. While with the Air Transport Association, he chaired RTCA Special Committee 117, A New Guidance
System for Approach and Landing. More recently, he led working groups in the RTCA Task Forces on Satellite Navigation and Digital
Communications.
In his consulting capacity, Poritzky has been active in a series of projects, among which are runway incursion analysis and prevention, analysis of GPS impacts, development of scenarios of CNS/ATM evolution around the world, assessment of "free-flight" prospects and potential, and a historical summary of aviation separation standards.
He was a charter member of the FAA Administrator's Research & Development Advisory Committee and its Runway Incursion Working Group, and chairman of its Subcommittee on Capacity Technology, and was a member of the Augustine FAA Research and Development Review panel. He currently serves on the Advisory Committee Air Traffic Services subcommittee.
Mr. Poritzky is the author of many articles and papers in the technical and trade press and has spoken widely to industry and professional societies in the
U.S. and abroad. He has prepared and presented Congressional testimony on many occasions. He has lectured to university groups (recently at the
Centre National D'Etudes Spatiales, Toulouse, France, the University of California Extension, Berkeley, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
and has written educational text material as well as a large number technical staff studies.
EDUCATION
Iowa State College, BS, Electrical Engineering
Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, Post Graduate work
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., Post Graduate work