Although our air transportation system is the best in the world, there are still
in efficiencies. In a busy airport environment, a lack of communication and
coordination can be issues amongst the operators who are responsible for
managing the phases of flights and with the growth of air traffic, terminal
airspace is becoming even more congested and inefficient, which can lead to
bottlenecks on the surface. So how can we find ways to make the current system
more efficient? This is where NASA's ATD2 demonstration comes in. The ATD2
testing focuses on ways to integrate the different systems that can cause these
inefficiencies into a new innovative system. It will integrate
arrival/departure and surface technologies or IADS and
other older technologies to improve the traffic management system at the airport.
This will increase predictability of aircraft movement times, improve overall
system efficiency and reduce fuel burn and emissions. That means that this tool
will help Airlines save money and passengers save time with less delays. In
order to learn how to implement this system nationwide NASA and its partners
are testing the new systems in a real-world environment. Air traffic
controllers and airline personnel will evaluate the system as they use it to
manage air traffic operations at a busy hub airport. I've been involved with NASA
since about 1995 and been participating and a lot of their demonstrations I knew
they were the right people to go to and and we got together we talked to through.
After looking at several options Charlotte Douglas International Airport
in Charlotte North Carolina was chosen to conduct initial testing. Charlotte was
ideal for many reasons. It turned out when the FAA and NASA were looking for a
location to demo this technology they were developing, Charlotte turned out to
be an ideal location. Primarily, because of where we're located along the
coasts and the multiple centers that we deal with. We have a very difficult time
getting aircraft off the Charlotte Airport into the overhead streams and we
have nine very definite arrival and departure banks a day at Charlotte with
about 45 minutes of recovery time between each of them. You could not have
tested a technology such as this at an airport like Newark, LaGuardia or JFK. You
run the risk of grinding the whole system to a halt, so Charlotte was an
ideal location to roll this out, and eventually this technology after its
incorporated into TFDM will be rolled out to all those other busy airports.
Anybody who takes a look at the Charlotte Douglas International Airport
and sees a map of it, sees the runways of a major international airport. If they
look closely however, they'll see that we have the ramp space of a mid-sized
Regional Airport and our departure and arrival banks at Charlotte pretty much
overlap nine times a day and we move between 75 to 80 arrivals and 75 to 80
departures through a very small confined grant space at Charlotte. We can't build
our way out of this one. To find the inefficiencies that are
there and to make things more efficient we're gonna have to use technology, and
once we begin using this technology and are sharing the information that we have,
and the airlines are sharing the information they have with us, we should
both be able to come to a much better solution to this problem and become more
efficient. The partnership between American Airlines the Charlotte Airport
you know NASA, the FAA, both headquarters and locally without controllers is
exceptional here and we've worked very, very well as a team to achieve the
objectives that we wanted from the project and I think that's it's been a
huge success because of that collaboration. We're very excited about
this partnership in Charlotte especially and we have not only American Airlines
involved with NASA, but the local FAA folks are involved, the airport
authorities involved, it's a real true collaboration. The airport surface for
many many years has been sort of the black hole in terms of understanding
what's happening on the surface and how that connects to the overhead stream of
aircraft, so what we want to do is be able to give the traveling public
whether it's American Airlines or other carriers a more predictable experience.
Because there's still a lot of uncertainty today, when you push away
from the gate and you wait to take off, and I think we've all been through that
at one time or the other. The ATD2 software will combine multiple concepts
and technologies including the FAA's three major operational decision support
system technologies called, Traffic Flow Management System, Time-Based Flow
Management and Terminal Flight Data Manager. Some of the most powerful stuff
it's the under the hood stuff that NASA has done with this dashboard that gives
us a very quick look of how the health of the airport is going. We measure
throughput in the FAA by number of arrivals and departures at the airport,
and what we're trying to do is find the inefficiencies that are there and
optimize the throughput by putting aircraft in the best possible place to
meet their slot in the overhead stream. We have very high hopes that we can make
things more efficient and we'll be using this equipment to do that. Another big
technology change is just the exchange of information amongst the different
players in the system, that right now each of the organ entities, the
facilities that are responsible for controlling the traffic, pretty much
operate within their sphere of influence without a lot of information flowing
between the facilities. And so a big part of ATD2 is to help that communications
flow amongst the different people that all are responsible for solving part of
the problem. Our objective is to improve the predictability of these integrator
driveable departure surface operations, because a lot of the inefficiencies that
are inherent in today's system are due to the lack of predictability. People do
not know what to expect when they're managing the traffic both on the FAA side
and air carrier side and so they they're conservative in their approach.
They introduce larger buffers and greater than needed traffic management
constraints because they don't know what's going to happen, but by help
sharing information amongst the parties that are trying to solve the problem and
tying it all together with a time based scheduling system, we expect to improve
the predictability and help folks be less conservative in their approach to
managing the traffic to provide smaller buffers in the system. It's a lot
of different systems that have, that may be out there today operating separately
but if we can connect them through networking, have the information and data
flowing between the systems, but it's not just the fact that the data and
information is beginning to flow across networks or into the other systems it's
what you do with that data also. So you know a lot of our technologies you could
think of you know the kids today might think of as apps so these are
applications that the operators can use and but it's telling them very important
and unique information about the schedule,
what aircraft should be in position at what time in order for the overall
operation to work most efficiently and that information will be shared with all
the participants, whereas now only part of the information
is usually resident with each of the participants. Well with that picture that
everybody has everybody knows what we're working towards it can function a lot
more efficiently. This increased predictability and merging of
technologies has the potential for huge benefits. Initial projections of 10
congested airports show the potential for ATD2's departure scheduling to
substantially reduce overall departure delay by 40% and enable flights to
absorb their delays at the gate, which leads to more environmentally friendly
operations. Over a 20 year lifecycle conservative estimates indicate a
potential savings of 8.2 billion dollars. I have been in the airline industry a
long time and I can say over the last 15 or 20 years I've been involved with
several different projects if you will and the
partnerships with NASA, they've all yielded very good results, I think this
is sort of the most exciting of all because it brings a lot more of the
pieces together in connecting the airport itself with the airspace around
the airport and overhead. I have seen more benefit from this program than
probably any other thing I've worked on in my 36 years as an air traffic
controller. It is clear that change is coming to our national airspace and
fortunately NASA, the FAA, air traffic controllers and their industry partners
are all working together to make sure that these changes are not only seamless
but improve our quality of life and the overall transportation system. Although
you may not see the inner workings of this unique system the increased
predictability will undoubtedly make flying less uncertain and much more
enjoyable.