True, except that the VDL mode 4 trial in Miami led the FAA to basically abandon VDL-4.
Actus,
The major development thrust by UPS/FAA was with UAT. A few US airports adopted VDL-4 for tracking aircraft/vehicles on the airport, I have never followed that up.The US Marines adopted VDL-4 tracking on some of their practice ranges.
UAT (being CDMA) is clearly the superior broadband datalink, and covers the whole "lower 48". Pick up any US GA magazine, and look at the services available over UAT, that 1090ES can never match.
Airlines were buying aircraft back in late 1997 that had 1090 fitted whether the airline wanted it or not.
Don't know who told you that furphy, simply not true, the major manufacturers only started fitting ADS-B Out to production aircraft in the mid-2000s, and as of now, less than 10% of the US airline fleet is fitted. I flew Boeing aircraft that were brand new deliveries in 2000, 1090ES was not even a customer option.
For any "glass cockpit" aeroplane (almost everything from mid-1980s) it was a huge and expensive job to retrofit. If my memory serves me correctly, the A380 was the first Airbus aircraft to be fitted with 1090ES ADS-B in production, although, obviously, it is now available across the Airbus production range.
Don't confuse the Airservices obfuscation about Mode S transponders, and ADS-B 1090ES capable transponders (Mode S we have had for a very long time) --- at one stage it seems AsA was publishing Mode S fleet figures as if every Mode S was ADS-B capable, which was the propaganda line at the time --- ADS-B was just a wire from a GPS to a Mode S transponder remember the AsA pamphlets and PowerPoint presentations --- I still have one somewhere on an Airservices CD.
The real story is that the major US avionics manufacturers did not own or control any of the patents for the UAT (Qualcomm = CDMA=Generation 3 and on mobile phones) or VDL (Ericsson = TDMA= Generation 2 mobile phones or first generation digital, GSM), the US airlines were in a parlous financial state, and they were sold a line that 1090ES would be a "cheap and cheerful" solution to ADS-B, and the lobbying was furious, hence my statement that the 1090ES was given a late entry into an ICAO competition that dated back to the 1980s.
As I have also previously posted, the airlines still had to fit a broadband data anyway, and last time I looked, VDL-2 was supplanted VHF AM for new generation ACARS, although "traditional" ACARS is alive and well.
Going to 1090ES for ADS-B, under the pressure of lobbying by the ATA and others is one of the dumbest decisions I have seen in a long aviation career, it will cost the whole aviation community many hundreds of millions of $$$, compared to the original plans/intentions of ICAO.
1090ES is a giant step BACKWARDS in technology.
Tootle pip!!
PS: Again, the last time I looked, Airservices is using the same ground stations as FAA, except the Australian ground stations have an empty card file slot, where the UAT transceiver would be in a US installation, beside the 1090ES card.