Trading energy for knowledge: Outside the NextGen box

What comes after NextGen? Two of the biggest trends in the technical world at large are the urge to decrease chemical energy use and the mushrooming tendency to exploit knowledge, which could be called increasing the use of mental energy. This paper takes the view that avionics must lead in applying the appropriate paradigm shifts to aviation. One of the most direct energy savings under development is Continuous Descent Approach (CDA), which doesn't need to be considered very new, since the Space Shuttle necessarily used CDA- indeed, unpowered approach-for over 30 years. A less direct energy saving is the increasing use of UAS. Removing the need for systems to support on- board crew saves considerable weight and corresponding energy. Another saving is obtained by improved aerodynamic shape of aircraft that depend on synthetic vision (SV). What all these approaches require is a quantum upgrade in situational awareness (SA), specifically 3- dimensional situational awareness, which I'll call 3DSA. Sharing airspace between piloted aircraft and UAVs adds a wrinkle: "I can see him, but he can't see me." SV is inevitable for a remote Pilot-In- Command (PIC) of a UAV, but has a way to go in gaining the confidence of on-board pilots. Upgrading to 3DSA introduces significant problems in presentation, and may require more "confidence in the black box." The time dimension will have to be promoted to the status of a true fourth dimension, so we should be thinking in terms of 4DSA. The most revolutionary aspect is the need to make a partial move away from SA as a property of each pilot individually, and towards an airspace-wide SA millions of times more complex than what any individual can handle. Fortunately, SA at any level is primarily a matter of information gathering, handling and presentation, which are all trending lower in cost. Hardware to upgrade SA is, or soon will be, within the reach of most GA owners; perhaps the major cost for all branches of aviation will be in training.